Automotive ADLs : A study on enforcing consistency through multiple architectural levels

Over the last decade, Architecture Description Languages (ADLs) are attracting considerable attention by automotive companies because they consider them as one of the key solutions to improve the quality of automotive electronic and software systems. Automotive ADLs like EAST-ADL, AADL, TADL, and AML are being defined to address not only the architectural description or the representation issues but also as a method to enable requirements traceability and early analysis of a system. Besides the automotive specific ADLs, SysML and MARTE are emerging as viable modeling approaches for automotive systems engineering domain as well. However, all these modeling approaches lack the capability of ensuring the architectural quality. This paper identifies an architectural inconsistency between the different architectural levels as one of the key issues regarding architectural quality of automotive systems and proposes a rule-based method to enforce consistency between these levels. Since there is no standard ADL for automotive systems, we first evaluated a set of modeling approaches based on the automotive specific modeling requirements and selected SysML mainly due to its flexibility, and mature and accessible tool support. We modeled a Cruise Control system to demonstrate modeling of an automotive system in SysML and to evaluate the method for the architectural consistency checking using SysML