Today, though still relatively stable, the roles of carmakers and their suppliers are undergoing a period of stress caused by the increased importance and added value of electronics. Most of today's embedded systems are required to work where the characteristics of the computational load cannot always be predicted in advance. The embedded systems are, by nature, inherently real-time. Moreover, most of embedded systems work under several resource constraints, due to space, weight, energy, and cost limitations imposed by the specific application. Still timely responses to events have to be provided within precise timing constraints in order to guarantee a desired level of performance. Novel methods and tools for system-level analysis and modeling are needed not only for predictability and composability when partitioning end-to-end functions at design time (and later, at system integration time), but also for providing guidance and support to the designer in the very early stage where the electronics and software architectures of product lines are evaluated and selected. The critical architecture-evaluation and selection design-process phase affects profoundly a product line's cost, performance, and quality. The objective of this document is to present the characteristics of modern embedded applications, the problems of the current approaches and discusses the new trends.