ISBN 9783843942058

978-3-8439-4205-8, Reihe Informatik

Christoph Knieke
Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures

214 Seiten, Dissertation Technische Universität Clausthal (2019), Softcover, A4

Zusammenfassung / Abstract

The amount of software in cars has been growing exponentially since the early 1970s and one can expect this trend to continue. Today, automotive software systems and functions are the major drivers for innovations in cars.

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers design and implement complex applications by mechanisms that allow them to implement such functionality on integrated platforms. This offers the opportunity to build a variety of similar systems with a minimum of technical diversity and thus allows for strategic reuse of components. However, the increasing complexity and degree of variability of automotive software systems hinders the capabilities for reusability and extensibility of these systems to an increasing degree. After several product generations, software erosion is growing steadily, resulting in an increasing effort of reusing software components, and planning of further development.

To minimize software erosion, a holistic approach for a long-term manageable and plannable software product line architecture for automotive software systems is introduced. The proposed approach aims at maintaining stability of the product line architecture and at minimizing software product architecture erosion in real world automotive systems even if extensive further development of the system takes place. A further objective is a high degree of reusability in real world automotive software development by achieving a high scalability, and a high degree of usage of the software components. The holistic approach supports the two levels of development - product line and product - and their interaction.

The first step of the proposed methodology aims at repairing an eroded software architecture. Architecture repair typically involves the two approaches recovery and discovery. This thesis investigates how these approaches can be adapted to recover the implemented automotive software product line architecture from the developed products and to discover the intended product line architecture.

The presented methodology was derived and established in the context of several industrial automotive projects: These are a brake servo unit (BSU) software system, a selective catalytic reduction (SCR) software system and the longitudinal dynamics torque coordination. As one result, architecture erosion could be avoided for several years, and a high degree of reuse could be achieved. Even the high number of potential variants could be managed with the approach.