F2008-05-039
Model-Based Approach for the Realization of a Collaborative Repository of all Vehicle Functionalities
In today´s commercial vehicle development process, the enhancement of the vehicle or the realization of the new line is obtained through an updating of single ECU and in definitive the vehicle improvements are seen as sum of these of all ECU´s. There is no OEM approach for managing the vehicle functionalities as a structured collection of interdependent functions, including code, data exchange and documentation, to be considered as independent of the ECU HW. In the last years the involvement of the Eltrac Embedded Software Development Department in different software development projects increased the need to evaluate the reuse of the Software Modules. Also because it allows gain the greatest return on the investment of the resources used to develop such Sw Modules. The Eltrac approach is focused on building a central repository of Vehicle functions linking application data and pre-existing functions models from different work teams. The idea is that the functionalities can be modeled and developed independently from any hardware platform. In this way, the main part of the development becomes a specific activity, dedicated to the functionality´s description through the elaboration of the logic that abstracts away from the hardware details and features of the ECU in which it will be resident. Therefore, we propose a new approach intended to support the following aspects: o Reusability through the cataloging of functionalities with dependency tracking; o Interoperability and standardization of data to be exchange among different functions; o Management of concurrent activities among different teams; o Interoperability among the used commercial tools, allowing system engineers and software engineers to move easily between proper tools across the development life cycle; o Maintainability of Central Repository: maintaining a central repository in terms of configuration management is similar to the activities required for the maintenance of any software product. The difference is that a catalogue of reusable component will be available a large number of projects. Then, the costs of maintaining it can be amortized over all developments; additionally, an individual project can gain the benefits of innovation by other projects. In the automotive domain where a short development time has to be combined with the development of a high quality product it is a well-known fact that much effort should be put also on the minimizing the software migration activity from the pre-existing ECUs in the new platform.
Session: Process