Abstract
Keywords - AUTOSAR, Systems Engineering, Embedded System Development, Architecture Abstraction, Automotive E/E Architecture Development
The future de-facto standard for automotive electric/electronic (E/E) architectures, AUTOSAR (1) , is becoming more and more mature. In December 2007 there has been a release of the version 3.0, and automotive OEMs are already using AUTOSAR technology in their series production projects. Even though there has been an evolution of which engineering information and concepts are 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.
As AUTOSAR has become a de facto standard, there is an obvious possibility now to define general systems engineering concepts complementary to and thus going beyond the current AUTOSAR specifications. In this paper we describe the advantages of having an integrated architecture description language (ADL) specific for the development of E/E systems in the automotive domain. We present the core concepts for such an integrated ADL which targets an overall systems engineering approach: the EAST-ADL2. The original EAST-ADL was developed in the EAST-EEA project (7) and basic concepts were reused in the AUTOSAR standardization initiative. Lately, the original EAST-ADL has been refined and extended in the ATESST project (www.atesst.org) to EAST-ADL2. The EAST-ADL2 conceptually integrates and links engineering information related to multiple engineering disciplines such as product line engineering, requirements engineering, control engineering, software engineering, safety engineering and real-time systems engineering. The ADL does not prescribe a specific development process and it lends itself to top-down, bottom-up and middle-out development approaches and methods. As a central part, the EAST-ADL2 defines a system model which is organized in parts representing different levels of abstraction, reflecting different views and levels of details of the vehicle E/E architecture. By identifying AUTOSAR as belonging to only one certain level of abstraction, namely the implementation level, we also show that there is a way to define complementary ADL concepts without interfering with AUTOSAR. These describe engineering information that is more abstract, with different engineering focus and thus - from the EAST-ADL2 perspective - on different levels of abstraction.