Resolving uncertainty in automotive feature interactions

The modern automobile is a complex electronic system with a number of features providing functionalities for driver and passenger convenience, control of the vehicle, and safety of the occupants. As new features are developed and introduced into the automobile, they interact with already existing features, sometimes resulting in undesirable behaviours. These undesirable interactions are often detected very late in the development cycle, or sometimes even in the field. This introduces uncertainty in the system development process as changes to address these interactions often result in a cascading series of changes whose scope is difficult to predict. This paper presents a method and algorithms for identifying and resolving feature interactions early in the development life-cycle by addressing the problem at the level of requirements specifications. We have applied this method successfully in the automotive domain and present a case study of detecting and resolving feature interactions.