Search Results

For a long time, tools and methods for automotive E/E design were mostly in the domain of academic researches only. Recently, OEMs have started adopting selected contributions, because (very soon) it will become quite costly NOT to apply them. The first step is establishing centralized data storage for all design data. At present, selecting appropriate abstraction levels and design methods that get fed by and feed the data is the task at hand. In this paper, we summarize recent progress in this selection process with a focus on performance; which is a key aspect for architecture generation. Our contribution provides incremental progress from both ends of the mentioned gap (requirements vs. architecture vs. implementation) towards one another. The presentation is created around the IMES project [21] considering centralized data storage. However, the overall approach is based on established standards and common design patterns as much as possible.

More electronic vehicle functions lead to an exponentially growing degree of software integration in automotive ECUs. We are seeing an increasing number of ECUs with mixed criticality software. ISO26262 describes different safety requirements, including freedom from interference and absence from error propagation for the software. These requirements mandate particular attention for mixed-criticality ECUs. In this paper we investigate the ability to guarantee that these safety requirements will be fulfilled by using established (deadline monitoring) and new error detection mechanisms (execution time monitoring). We also show how these methods can be used to build up safe and efficient schedules for today's and future automotive embedded real time systems with mixed criticality software.

The integration of mixed-criticality software according to safety standards like ISO 26262 generates new, parasitic mutual effects within the involved software architectures. In this situation, established schedule design patterns like RMS fail to deliver both efficiency and safety, in particular the freedom of interference. In today's practice of building a schedule, certain such measures to fulfill these safety requirements can conflict with efficiency requirements. The target of this paper is to present a sound approach of how to solve such requirement conflicts and to build up schedules that are safe and also efficient. We present a general early-stage procedure to build safe, certifiable, and efficient schedules. The procedure is based on the established design patterns and adds guidelines on how to exploit additional options in both schedule design and software partitioning. This procedure was validated against typical real-world systems and one example is presented.

The sound decomposition of system level timing requirements, including end-to-end deadlines, into local timing requirements and latency budgets is a key automotive design challenge. In this paper, we analyze the technical and organizational influences on the end-to-end deadline decomposition. We will identify and assess typical design options. From this, we provide two key contributions: First, we provide guidelines for the decomposition and the application of design rules. Secondly, we analyze the specific requirements and specialties of different use cases. The findings of this paper enable optimizations and traceability of timing requirements through the entire Electrics/Electronics (E/E) design cycle. This is a prerequisite for reliable, cost-efficient automotive system design.