Model-Based Deployment in Automotive Embedded Software: From a High-Level View to Low-Level Implementations

The electronic components in present-day automobiles are based on networks of electronic control units (ECU) running embedded software. The development of distributed, concurrent software applications based on such ECU networks is becoming increasingly complex and error-prone. In current practice, system-level views of the network are merely used to characterise technical constraints such as performance requirements, and to choose the hardware and software components accordingly. In contrast, the semantic integration of the distributed functions is typically deferred to later points in the development process, yielding a high effort for integrating and validating such distributed functions. To address in particular this issue, our paper advocates a more stringent use of high-level models based on distinct abstractions and a well-defined behavioural semantics. We introduce the corresponding notations and tools, and the overall methodology developed to support a stepwise development of distributed automotive applications. The paper then details on the issues of using such high-level models to facilitate deployment, and to obtain low-level implementations from integrated system models