F2008-05-053
Engineering Support for Automotive Embedded Systems -Beyond AUTOSAR
The automotive standard for E/E architectures, AUTOSAR, is becoming more and more mature. In December 2007 there is a release of the version 3.0, and automotive OEMs are planning for use of AUTOSAR in their series production projects. At the moment the working groups of the AUTOSAR partnership are exploring what extensions and changes to include for version 4.0. Even though there has been an evolution of what is part of AUTOSAR and there are still things to be defined, there will always be a number of issues outside the scope of this standardization initiative.
In this paper we describe the advantages of having a standardized architectural description language (ADL) specific for E/E systems in the automotive domain. Especially as AUTOSAR has become a de facto standard, there is an obvious possibility now to define an ADL complementary to AUTOSAR. We present a novel definition of relations and integration between the system model of such an automotive specific ADL, the EAST-ADL2, and AUTOSAR. The EAST-ADL2 system model is organized in parts representing different levels of abstraction and thus reflecting different views and levels of details of the architecture. One or more levels can be adopted according to company specific engineering processes. By identifying AUTOSAR as belonging to only one certain level of abstraction (the implementation level), we also show why there is a need to define complementary ADL constructs, i.e. for everything to be described on other levels of abstraction.
The modelling of certain engineering information is outside the scope of AUTOSAR. The following information, which is supported by the EAST-ADL2, thus provides an important complement to AUTOSAR: o vehicle feature modeling including concepts to support product families o concepts for defining variability in all parts of a model o vehicle environment modeling to define context and perform validation o structural and behavioral modeling of functions and hardware entities in the context of distributed systems. o requirements modeling and tracing with all modeling entities over all levels of abstraction o other information part of the system description, such as a definition of component timing and failure modes, necessary for design space exploration and system verification purposes
The EAST-ADL language is structured in four abstraction levels, each with corresponding environment system representation: o Vehicle Level for elaboration of electronic features o Analysis Level for abstract functional definition of features in system context o Design Level for detailed functional definition of software including elementary decomposition o Implementation Level describing reusable code (platform independent) and AUTOSAR compliant software and system configuration for hardware deployment In addition, it includes an extensible concept for requirement engineering and validation processes to enable company specific methods and annotations.
As AUTOSAR is part of the EAST-ADL2, there is no conflict between the two standardization initiatives. As is the case for AUTOSAR, EAST-ADL2 is still not completely defined, but subject to refinement in the ATESST project (www.atesst.org). In this paper is further described how EAST-ADL2 is complementary to AUTOSAR and what is still to be defined.
Session: AUTOSAR and beyond