Model-Driven Aspect-Specific Systems Engineering in the Automotive Domain

The design and development of modern automobiles have become a big challenge for the automotive industry. The complexity of automotive hard-and software systems constantly increases due to the development and advancement of various kinds of safety, security, and comfort features. Even though various tools for model-based systems engineering exist in the automotive domain, some cover every phase and every aspect of the whole development process. The extent and complexity of the resulting models make it difficult to efficiently analyze, evaluate and possibly optimize corresponding architectures concerning specific aspects.An approach to overcome these barriers is the development of aspect-specific toolchains based on automotive architectural models. Such toolchains must be specially tailored to certain aspects of interest, and at the same time, be sufficiently adaptable to offer flexibility and reusability. Modern model-driven approaches can be used to achieve these goals.This paper presents a model-driven development workflow for aspect-specific tools for analyzing, evaluating, and optimizing specific measures of automotive hard-and software architectures. It presents some details of an aspect-specific application developed as a proof of concept for the suggested workflow. Moreover, it presents some challenges using the suggested workflow and the developed tool for a complex real-world automotive system model.