Dealing With the OEM-Supplier Relationship in the Development of Embedded Software

Embedded electronic systems play an increasingly important role in the automotive field. Since they are the key to innovations and are the basis of most new functions, this paper deals with how to develop them. The first part identifies the problems that to a large extent arise from the particular organizational structure of the automotive industry. The second part of the paper describes an approach to how to control the complexity of the process. Information domains are introduced for this purpose. Contracts in these information domains between the process participants define the actual system behavior.