Premium quality and innovation are the cornerstones of the leading positions of car manufacturers and suppliers in the world market. The permanently increasing complexity of in-car electronics and the rapidly growing amount of automotive software running on embedded electronic control units, places higher demands on quality assurance for the future. Quality cannot be implemented into software on embedded control units after their development. Methods for defects detection have to be constituted to automatically stop development to fix a problem before the defect continues downstream. In addition preventive actions have to be taken in respect of front-loading quality and reliability. An automatic and tool independent check of custom development rules, quality standards and enterprise wide guidelines can support the quality assurance process in the development of automotive control software. In the domain of automotive software engineering there is a lack of automated checking for standard conformance. Especially, a formal and tool independent notation of rules to follow is missing. In this chapter, the model-based design of automotive vehicle functions is taken as an example to show how textual rules describing development standards to be met can be transformed into a formal notation using the open standards Meta Object Facility and Object Constraint Language. Thereafter these rules can be checked automatically. The feasibility of this approach is shown by a software demonstrator.
Automotive Software Engineering
