Improving Solution Reuse in Automotive Embedded Applications using a Pattern Library Based Approach

Given the rise in automotive application complexity and ever shorter development cycles, solution reuse is of great value. The reuse of proven solutions (e.g., Safety Mechanisms or architecture designs) for safety-critical applications is considered a good practice for increasing confidence in the system and cutting development cost and time, and is widely-spread in practice. However, reuse in safety-critical applications is mostly ad-hoc, with lack of process maturity or adequate tool support. Moreover, it is difficult to assess the quality or completeness of a reuse process, if there is no "definition of done". We defined a structured "Pattern Library" approach for the reuse of Safety Mechanisms (fault avoidance / error detection and handling) in the automotive domain, elaborating a prototypical tool implementation for both Pattern Developer and User role. I pragmatically demonstrated the effectiveness of the approach via the evaluation of instantiations into a generic research CASE tool (AutoFOCUS3), as well as a domain-adequate automotive safety modeling framework (SAFE Framework), which subjectively demonstrate improvements in the maturity, adequacy and completeness of the reuse, as well as how the approach can be used to guide tool selection, development and/or extension. I also showcased how the approach can generally be applied to other system design reuse problems, via an instantiation into a large scale automotive functional & technical component library at a leading automotive supplier. These steps and results have been published. The next steps are to consolidate and formalize the instantiations and their results to provide academic rigor to the approach.