Reuse of software in distributed embedded automotive systems

Until recently, in the automotive industry, reuse of software has en-tirely been a typical activity of suppliers. They try to reduce the increasing software development costs that stem from rising com-plexity and size of software in the modern automobile. Lately, also the automotive manufacturers began to develop specific software with competitive relevance. Now they have to deal with the prob-lem of reuse, too. Nevertheless, there is a difference between the manufacturers ’ and the suppliers ’ point of view because the man-ufacturers have to integrate the networked hardware components to one automotive system. Therefore, the manufacturers have to deal with additional problems compared to the supplier. At the be-ginning of this paper, the specific problems of reuse of software in the automotive domain are shown from the perspective of auto-motive manufacturers. After that, a framework is proposed to deal with these problems. Moreover, the application of this framework is shown in a realistic application example