For a US state, Nevada is quite fascinating, not only because of Las Vegas. However, getting a fun car and cruise up and down the Strip is an experience of its own. Even though traffic usually is slow, for us tourists this is fairly dangerous since the city changes its face every few months and there are so many new things to gape at every time. Now Nevada is getting a new kind of attraction which may in future even allow ALL occupants to lean back, sip some Gin Tonic and take a look at the latest megalomanic casino and hotel creation.
When talking to company officials in charge of standards and norms one can get the impression that AUTOSAR is only being endorsed because any standard seems better than none. In terms of implementation, many companies interpret the »S« in AUTOSAR not as »System« but solely as »Software« -understandable, since this part of any system causes the most trouble. The recently published roadmap for the near future accounts for that interpretation.
Mazda's new compression technology »SKYACTIV« is being deployed in the new »CX-5«. In order to design the neccessary control network, the car manufacturer made use of specialized development software.
Safety-critical industries like automotive are regulated by complex norms and standards which, among other things, complicate life for system engineers. Pre-certified tools make the development and sign-off process easier, and now two fairly common MISRA tools have received the official blessing of TÜV Süd.
In modern automotive systems, various bus systems, rigid safety demands and the need for high performance at low power have to be balanced. While there are many specialized automotive chips like microcontrollers and SoCs around, this is an area where the general trend towards higher integration finally makes sense.
It's a good thing when an official industry standard is constantly being developed and thus filled with life. However, when the standard evolves fast, there's always the problem that some implementers remain at an older version. This can lead to fragmentation, and the »standard« isn't a standard anymore.
In terms of software development, AUTOSAR sets rather good practices. Actually, it has a few advantages over general purpose SW development standards with its coverage of the full development cycle easily the most important. Unfortunately, the AUTOSAR development partnership isn’t too fond of allowing the software architecture outside of the automotive market. Now, they start opening up. A bit.
The ISO 26262 functional safety standard for road vehicles poses various problems for component manufacturers as well as for system integrators. Luckily, not all control units in a car are that safety critical, but the ones that need to comply require extensive checking and testing during all stages of product development.
For processes that are controlled by embedded systems, more and more software is needed in vehicles that has to be put through its paces in order to ensure safety and reliability. In a modern car, this software often contains more than ten million lines of software code. The difficulty is to define meaningful tests to eliminate as many potential failure causes as possible already in the software test phase. An evolutionary approach might provide the right test for the right situation.
Modern cars consist of dozens of electronic control units. This modular architecture facilitates development and manufacturing as well as after-sales service. Even testing isn’t too hard, except when it comes to interactions between the modules. At that point, functional testing needs to go hand in hand with communications analysis.
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