Supporting Early Modeling and End-to-end Timing Analysis of Vehicular Distributed Real-Time Applications

Abstract-The current model-and component-based development approaches for automotive distributed real-time systems have non-existing, or limited, support for modeling network traffic originating from outside the vehicle, i.e., vehicle-tovehicle, vehicle-to-infrastructure, and cloud-based applications. We present novel modeling and analysis techniques to allow early end-to-end timing analysis of distributed applications based on their models and simple models of network traffic that originates from outside of the model. As a proof of concept, we implement these techniques in the existing industrial tool suite Rubus-ICE which is used for the development of software for vehicular embedded systems by several international companies. We also conduct an application-case study to validate our techniques. I. INTRODUCTION An important class of emerging distributed applications is novel functionality in road vehicles. These applications realize novel services based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) and vehicleto-infrastructure (V2I) communications. Both V2V and V2I are expected to support novel applications for road-safety, traffic efficiency, and driver/passenger comfort and entertainment. Already today there are examples of traffic related cloud-services, e.g., community map and turn-by-turn navigation such as Waze [1] and traffic-congestion information by Google. However, to be successfully adopted, the development of these new applications needs to be integrated in contemporary workflow for development of vehicular functions. Development strategies for automotive, and other vehicular applications, are to a great extent based on model-based development. In these approaches detailed models of the behavior of each on-board function is developed and successively refined to reach the implementation of each node. In this refinement process, the communications needed for each node are derived and a message set for each on-board network is defined. Moreover, timing parameters and requirements for each message are established. In its current form there is often non-existing, or limited, support to model network traffic originating from outside the vehicle. That is traffic from V2V, V2I, and other, e.g., cloud-based applications are not naturally modeled and analyzed in existing approaches