Evolution of Long-Term Industrial Meta-Models – A Case Study

Meta-models in software engineering are used todefine properties of models. Therefore the evolution of the metamodelsinfluences the evolution of the models and the softwareinstantiated from them. The evolution of the meta-models isparticularly problematic if the software has to instantiate twoversions of the same meta-model - a situation common for longtermsoftware development projects such as car developmentprojects. In this paper, we present a case study of the evolutionof the standardized meta-model used in the development ofthe automotive software systems – the AUTOSAR meta-model– at Volvo Car Corporation. The objective of this study is toassist the automotive software designers in planning long termdevelopment projects based on multiple AUTOSAR meta-modelversions. We achieve this by visualizing the size and complexityincrease between different versions of the AUTOSAR meta-modeland by calculating the number of changes which need to beimplemented in order to adopt a newer AUTOSAR meta-modelversion. The analysis is done for each major role in the automotivedevelopment process affected by the changes