Development of Distributed Automotive Software

Abstract

The software complexity in modern vehicle electronic systems is increasingly growing. Vehicle projects have to take into account a growing number of interconnected functions, which are jointly developed by many persons in many different companies. For facing these challenges, new design methodologies for a formalized and partially automated software development are required. The DaVinci design methodology has been developed to match the specific requirements of distributed automotive systems. This includes the functionoriented design of the system structure as well as the deployment on a network and software integration on ECUs (electronic control units). Such a design serves as basis for an automatic code generation process, which integrates the applications into an efficient ECU target architecture with real-time operating system (RTOS) and communication stack. Typical scenarios during the development processes like the reuse, exchange and integration of design data are supported and combined with a flexible configuration management. PC-based test environments may be used for functional integration tests or verification of the network communication. This article is supposed to give a brief overview of the methodology as well as some selected aspects of its implementation in the DaVinci tool suite. Design methodology, distributed embedded systems, automotive.