Technical Foundations for the Development of Automotive Embedded Systems

Building an automobile today is a very complex process. Various computer hardware and software components have to work together to ensure a safe and comfortable drive. The customers can choose from a wide range of customizing options and automobile models to finally buy their automobile. How this effects the number of features in an automobile is described in Section 1, while how this increases the requirements for production is described in Section 2 and Section 3 of this report. For the manufacturers of automobiles this means, they have to handle an already large and still growing number microcontrollers and software components. While a growing number of features in automobiles allow them to strengthen their brand and sell more automobiles, a growing number of hardware components means growing weight and production cost. Both means automobiles become more expensive and less of them can be sold. Another problem is to integrate new features successfully, regarding hardware and software interoperability with already existing systems. This is shown in more detail in Section 4 and Section 5 of this report. To overcome these problems either the used computer hardware has to be unified or the used software has to be standardized to allow faster integration. Unifying hardware means using generalized hardware which is at the moment to expensive to use it for all systems in a car. Standardizing software currently is a much more promising approach and therefore is pursued by the Automotive Open System Architecture Consortium, with already promising results. Section 6 of this report clarifies what th