Model-Driven Application Development for Evaluation and optimization of Automotive E/E-Architectures

Over the last decades, automobiles have developed from predominantly mechanical machines to driving computers, consisting of a large number of sensors, actuators, and electronic control units that use various types of communication busses to form large and complex cyber-physical systems which provide a variety of comfort and safety features for the driver. Such E/E-systems (electric/electronic systems) do not only require high availability and reliability, but also overall efficient architectures and topologies. Because of the already high (and constantly increasing) level of complexity of such systems, the evaluation and optimization of their corresponding architectures has become a big challenge. The need for evaluation and optimization methods that are capable of abstracting the systems’ complexity is evident for the automotive industry. In general, when it comes to designing and developing hard- and software systems, the paradigm of model-driven engineering emphasizes and supports the measures of abstraction, flexibility, and reusability to be able to grasp the complexity of modern systems. This paper presents a model-driven application for evaluating and optimizing automotive E/E-architectures as part of an integrated, model-based toolchain, developed with the Eclipse Modeling Framework.