As the amount of embedded software in the vehicle increases dramatically, the software design and development tasks are daunting. Over the past few years, the automotive industry has taken measures to increase software re-use and promote competition among basic software vendors. If AUTOSAR has emerged as the de-facto standard for embedded automotive software development, there are numerous challenges ahead as the standard assumes the availability of both the hardware and the associated abstraction layer among others.
This can be problematic for developers. Furthermore, engineers may be interested in performing early what if tests - early functional tests - to ensure that their strategies will not cause problems later in the development process. As always, errors are less costly to fix if they can be caught early.
With AUTOSAR several thousand parameters have to be configured in about 60 modules. We propose to explore a novel development approach for AUTOSAR software that is based on virtualization where AUTOSAR configurations can be established early in the design. This approach will help to guarantee functional correctness and consistency of the configurations all along the development process.
This paper addresses some of the challenges associated with the development of embedded software using AUTOSAR, particularly when it comes to integrating functions to an ECU.