From deployment to platform exploration: automatic synthesis of distributed automotive hardware architectures

abstract

In order to cope with the rising complexity of today's systems, model-based development of software-intensive embedded systems has become a de-facto standard in recent years. In a previous work, we demonstrated how such a model-based approach can enable automatization of certain development steps, namely the deployment of logical (platform-independent) system models to technical (platform-specific) system models. Together with Continental, we especially focused on industrial applicability. In this work, we demonstrate how we extended, again in cooperation with Continental, the previous approach in order to enable a synthesis of the topology of technical platforms (E/E architectures) together with a deployment. We furthermore introduced variability concepts in order to model variants of technical platforms which is an industrial required need. Our approach is thus capable of calculating a platform architecture and its topology which is optimized in terms of the deployment of logical system models, constraints, optimization objectives and choses the optimal variant for all technical models.