White Papers
AUTOSAR and FlexRay: A Tale of Two Standards
The emerging automotive design software standard known as AUTOSAR (Automotive Open System Architecture) began as the product of an industry-wide effort among European auto makers and their suppliers. Its objectives are similar to those of software standards in other industries: to bring structure, clean interfaces and implicit methodologies to a process—in this case, the design of distributed systems within automobiles. FlexRay™ is a serial bus communication standard that has evolved over roughly the same time span as AUTOSAR. FlexRay came into existence as a solution for the shortcomings of the prevailing automotive bus standards, particularly the CAN protocol.
Like AUTOSAR, FlexRay counts many prominent automotive OEMs and suppliers among its advocates. Boasting much higher performance (in every respect) than other in-vehicle buses, FlexRay alone is suited for “x-by-wire” applications that must deliver absolutely predictable results for steering, braking, and so forth. What do these lofty aspirations mean to the designer who needs to get a complex array of automotive functions working together with high reliability? To the executive responsible for minimizing costs while delivering timely, compelling products to customers? To the end-users of tomorrow’s automobiles?
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Step by Step...Confidently: Through the AUTOSAR Round Trip
This paper demonstrates the interaction and the interoperability of architecture and model-based design environments in five steps using the examples of MATLAB, Simulink, and Embedded Coder by MathWorks, as well as the AUTOSAR authoring tool Volcano Vehicle Systems Architect (VSA) by Mentor Graphics.
Round-Trip Engineering Key to AUTOSAR-based Development
This paper discusses how round-trip engineering can be used as an iterative development process and describes interoperability between tools from Mentor and MathWorks.
Model-based design has become an important component in vehicle manufacturer and supplier development processes. Electronic control units are complex in terms of functionality, connectivity, and variants; therefore automotive engineers must constantly optimize their development processes in order to keep up with the competition. It is essential that the tools in use support all-over design iterations -- the so-called round-trip engineering. The challenge is to make sure that intermediate results with regard to AUTOSAR artifacts remain consistent when they are exchanged between different tools. This is especially important in the interaction between tools used in model-based design to model functional behavior and the AUTOSAR authoring tool for architecture modeling.
The Electrifying Side of AUTOSAR: The Case for Using the ECU Resource Template
This paper describes a meta-model that covers specific portions of software-oriented AUTOSAR development methodology using the ECU Resource Template.
Prior to actual software development, the standardized and open AUTOSAR meta-model can be used to develop an architecture. The ECU Resource Template is particularly well suited for such tasks, because it opens up the actual software-oriented AUTOSAR development methodology to the electrical architecture process.