Service-Based Software Development for Automotive Applications

Software development for the automotive domain is currently subject to a silent revolution. On the one hand, software has become the enabling technology for almost all safety-critical and comfort functions offered to the customer: Cars have evolved into distributed computing platforms, which host dozens of networked and interacting processors, implementing hundreds of software-enabled features. On the other hand, the complexity induced by this large number of functions, their interactions, and their supporting infrastructure is becoming the limiting factor for automotive software development. Industry standards, including OSGi[1] and AMI-C[2], address these issues by introducing service-based software-architectures and corresponding middleware layers as modeling and deployment abstractions. This marks a significant shift from component- to service-oriented software development in the automotive domain. As a consequence, development methods and tools for analysis, design, implementation, and quality assurance of automotive software services are dearly needed. This paper reports on a service-based software development approach currently being pursued as a collaboration between Ford and the University of California at San Diego. Its centerpieces are the capturing and design of the interaction patterns defining service executions on distributed platforms, the mapping of the captured interaction patterns to concrete deployment architectures, and the validation of system executions against the resulting specifications.