Verifying & validating non-functional properties of automotive software architectures in early design stages

An increasing number of functions in modern automobiles are software-based. A modern automotive architecture contains up to 100 electronic control units (ECU) that communicate with one another to ensure proper vehicle functionality. The requirements and the set of provided functionalities of automotive embedded systems are growing, the complexity of these systems is continuously increasing as well. Early verification of automotive software architectures is necessary to prevent failures and to save costs during the design. Considering solely functional properties of the software for networked embedded systems is insufficient to satisfy the quality requirements in the automotive domain. To produce robust software-based embedded systems in a cost-efficient way, an early verification of non-functional properties is inevitable. Based on a specific simulation framework, written in SystemC, the open tool-chain framework ERNEST provides flexible mechanisms to verify non-functional properties of component-based software systems in early design stages. ERNEST can be integrated easily into a model-based design flow and is based on the open-source development platform Eclipse. Thus, it states an extensible tool platform for verifying non-functional properties, which can easily be enhanced by various analysis techniques