A comprehensive framework for the analysis of automotive systems

Analysis models, technologies and tools are extensively used in the automotive domain to validate and optimize the design and implementation of SW systems. This is especially true for modern systems including advanced autonomous (and complex) features. The range of analysis methods that can be applied is extremely wide and goes from functional correctness to functional safety to timing (and schedulability), security, and possibly even more. The AUTOSAR automotive standard has been defined with the purpose of standardizing the SW architecture of automotive systems and enable the construction of systems by composing SW components that are portable and abstract with respect to the underlying HW/SW platform. However, AUTOSAR was originally developed with portability of code in mind, and even if it quickly evolved to include a system-level modeling language (with its metamodel) and later extensions to deal with the needs of analysis methods (and tools), it is hardly comprehensive and still affected by several omissions and limitations. To fix the limitations with respect to timing and schedulability analysis Bosch developed the Amalthea (later App4MC) metamodel and tools. In Huawei, a more general (and ambitious) approach was undertaken to support not only timing analysis, but also model checking (or other types of formal verification), safety analysis and even design optimization. The approach is based on the concepts of a unified (modular) metamodel and a framework based on Eclipse to integrate analysis methods and tools. In this paper we describe the framework and the results obtained with respect to the objectives of functional verification and timing analysis.