Software Engineering in the European Automotive Industry: Achievements and Challenges

Context. The share and importance of software within automotive vehicles is growing steadily. Most functionalities in modern vehicles, especially safety related functions like advanced emergency braking, are controlled by software. A complex and common phenomenon in today's automotive vehicles is the distribution of such software functions across several Electronic Control Units (ECUs) and consequently across several ECU system software modules. As a result, integration testing of these distributed software functions has been found to be a challenge. The automotive industry neither has infinite resources, nor has the time to carry out exhaustive testing of these functions. On the other hand, the traditional approach of implementing an ad-hoc selection of test scenarios based on the tester's experience, can lead to test gaps and test redundancies. Hence, there is a pressing need within the automotive industry for a feasible and effective verification strategy for testing distributed software functions. Objectives. Firstly, to identify the current approach used to test the distributed automotive embedded software functions in literature and in a case company. Secondly, propose and validate a feasible and effective verification strategy for testing the distributed software functions that would help improve test coverage while reducing test redundancies and test gaps. Methods. To accomplish the objectives, a case study was conducted at Scania CV AB, Södertälje, Sweden. One of the data collection methods was through conducting interviews of different employees involved in the software testing activities. Based on the research objectives, an interview questionnaire with open-ended and close-ended questions has been used. Apart from interviews, data from relevant artifacts in databases and archived documents has been used to achieve data triangulation. Moreover, to further strengthen the validity of the results obtained, adequate literature support has been presented throughout. Towards the end, a verification strategy has been proposed and validated using existing historical data at Scania. Conclusions. The proposed verification strategy to test distributed automotive embedded software functions has given promising results by providing means to identify test gaps and test redundancies. It helps establish an effective and feasible approach to capture function test coverage information that helps enhance the effectiveness of integration testing of the distributed software functions.

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“…This increasing role of software in controlling automotive functions has been identified in several other researches like in [7] and [24].…”

Section: Software In the Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 76%

“…The automotive industry has traditionally been, and to a certain extent continues to be, dominated by electrical and mechanical engineering concepts [24] [25]. But this predominant nature of the industry is seeing a slow yet steady shift for nearly a decade now.…”

Section: Software In the Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

An Effective Verification Strategy for Testing Distributed Automotive Embedded Software Functions: A Case Study

Chunduri

Feldt

Adenmark

2016

Product-Focused Software Process Improvement

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“…Motor industry software reliability association (MISRA) was formed in response to the UK Safety Critical Systems Research Programme. It produced coding guidelines to ensure safety, security, portability and reliability for embedded software [26], [27]. Currently, the guidelines are available for C and C++ programming language.…”

Section: Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There are also industrial RTOS that is MISRA compliant. The certified RTOS will help save the cost and time needed to validate the OS part in software [27]. In principle, the bigger the system is, the greater the time and cost could be saved.…”

Section: Automotive Industrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Embedded operating system and industrial applications: a review

et al. 2021

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The complexity of an embedded system is directly proportional to the requirements of industrial applications. Various embedded operating system (OS) approaches had been built to fulfil the requirements. This review aims to systematically address the similarities and differences of the embedded OS solutions and analyse the factors that will influence decision-making when choosing what solution to use in the applications. This paper reviews three standard solutions; super loop, cooperative, and real-time operating system (RTOS). These are commonly used in industrial applications. By grouping the tasks in the foreground and background execution region, the concept and working principle of each of them are reviewed. The unique feature of RTOS in the context of task switching was used to define the deterministic characteristic of meeting the deadlines. The importance and performance of this characteristic is addressed and compared among various solutions in this paper. Subsequently, this paper reviewed the internet of things (IoT) requirements, automotive, medical and consumer electronics industry. The influential factors on choosing the right embedded OS to be used are extracted based on the requirements. They are reviewed in the perspective of memory footprint, regulated standards, cost-effectiveness, time effectiveness, and scalability.

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“…and a controller unit such as PLC's programmed by some ladder diagram programming to control the actuators and sensors. Which will lead to enhance the safety of the automobiles [11].…”

Section: Literature Surveymentioning

confidence: 99%

Recent Development of Automation in Vehicle Manufacturing Industries

2019

IJITEE

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This paper presents the application of automation in different areas of motor vehicle manufacturing industry such as; robotic wheel loading, defect tracking in process, automated machine adjustment and restructuring, decision making, multi arm operation, final assembly and most important safety feature. In this work explore the present automation application and also find out the better way to implement in future to minimize the human efforts and time. These technologies based on the automation and artificial intelligence that will helps to make the process more efficient, stable and flexible. Moreover, aspects of changeability and adaptiveness of automation system have to be considered. The aim of this study to identified the opportunities and scope for future research trend in the field of automobile industries.

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Software Engineering in the European Automotive Industry: Achievements and Challenges

Cited by 18 publications

References 9 publications

An Effective Verification Strategy for Testing Distributed Automotive Embedded Software Functions: A Case Study

An Effective Verification Strategy for Testing Distributed Automotive Embedded Software Functions: A Case Study

Embedded operating system and industrial applications: a review

Recent Development of Automation in Vehicle Manufacturing Industries

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