Platforms for the automotive tool-chain
Abstract
Standardized platforms establish themselves in many areas as an answer to increased development costs and quality issues in software development.
The automobile industry defines platforms for control software within AUTOSAR and Genivi. OEMs and suppliers hereby expect cost reductions and quality increases through standardized interfaces. Standardized platforms improve the quality of the infrastructure components of the software and allow a focus on the differentiating functionalities. These advantages also arise with the use of a platform strategy in the development of tools.
Cost reduction using platforms
When considering the development tools in a product development process, many similar features are independently developed anew by the tool manufacturers and with different technologies, including data storage, user interfaces, connection to architecture tools and graphical editors.
AUTOSAR for example defines an XML interchange format in order to process the AUTOSAR descriptions beyond the tool boundaries. Three tools from different companies read the XML and after that hold the AUTOSAR-models in its own specific representation in the memory.
Consequently, the same functionality has to be paid for by the customer three times. Thereby, XML is very complex and costly to implement. Therefore, it can be predicted that there is also a demand for re-use of the tool chain. Open source platforms offer this possibility. At this point, Eclipse can be of use in different scenarios.
»out of the box«
Eclipse provides many applications that can be used directly. This includes development environments for C and Java and also for modeling according to UML, data mining and others.
Integration platform
The common data model and infrastructure enables a tool design in such a way that they are more closely linked and thus tool gaps avoided.
Project-specific functions
Development departments can build specific features on this platform that are not provided by the tools.
Basis for applications
Part of the Eclipse-platform are frameworks for data management, user interfaces, graphical editors, forms or web access. are part of the Eclipse platform. Projects can set up their development on these frameworks and reduce cost. There are additional platforms for certain industries - partially independent of Eclipse. For the automotive sector, this is for example Artop.
Artop
The AUTOSAR Tool Platform (Artop) is an Eclipse-based implementation of basic functionality for AUTOSAR development tools. Artop and its source code are freely available for all AUTOSAR members and partners.
itemis perceives Artop as a viable platform for development tools in the automotive sector and provides its technologies in the model-based software development as a contributing member to the project. itemis advises OEM's and tool developers in the development, adaptation and introduction of Eclipse-based and Artop-based tools.
ARText
AUTOSAR models for complete and partial systems can reach considerable sizes. The experience with building and managing such models shows that graphical editors often reach their limits here.
An efficient alternative are modern textual languages. Textual models resolve differently from graphical models issues such as version control and model comparison. Thus, textual editors are much more cost-effective to implement and for the most part, are automatically generated.
ARText provides a convenient editor for AUTOSAR models, that are based on the itemis developed core technology »Xtext«. Please contact us if you need support with the use and adoption of ARText.