Overview
Fully Electric Vehicles (FEV) promise clear benefits to society. At the same time, the engineering of FEV introduces significant new challenges. FEV will be highly integrated and increasingly dependent on software and electronics. FEV systems will have more authority, share common components and rely less on mechanical backups. New complex power management and optimization algorithms are needed to ensure high performance, range of travel and low energy consumption. We argue that the challenges faced in the engineering of FEV are already partly met by EAST-ADL2, an emerging automotive architecture description language (ADL) compliant with AUTOSAR, and that EAST-ADL2 is the appropriate vehicle for fully meeting these challenges. MAENAD will extend EAST-ADL2 with advanced capabilities to facilitate development of dependable, efficient and affordable FEV.
The project will achieve language and tool support for:
- Support for the ISO 26262 automotive safety standard, including a novel approach for automatic allocation of safety requirements to components of an evolving architecture
- Effective model-based prediction of quality attributes of FEV such as the dependability and performance, via use of advanced, scalable, automated techniques.
- Automated exploration of potentially huge design spaces to achieve better or optimal trade-offs among dependability, performance and cost.
The scope of the modelling language and analysis focuses on the system structure and dynamics, in terms of physical, computational and communication components, their composition and interactions. To achieve those objectives, MAENAD will exploit and further develop the present state of the art in model-based design, assessment and optimization technologies. In addition, MAENAD will propose an overall design methodology for FEV and evaluate its application via a realistic case study on an innovative FEV system which represents a current design challenge.
EAST-ADL is an architecture description language tailored for the automotive industry. The EAST-ADL approach relies on AUTOSAR for representing software architecture but extends to more abstract representations. It includes support for requirements engineering, safety engineering, variability management, and product line architectures. However, it is lacking support for some of the engineering steps involved in FEV development.
EAST-ADL has been refined in the FP7 project ATESST2, and is used in parallel projects that provide language feedback and refinement suggestions. The MAENAD project will define language constructs, development methodology and prototype tools that meet the needs of FEV development. The basis is the current version of EAST-ADL, version 2.1.
The project budget is around 4 mio EUR and the duration is three years starting Sept 2010.