Lightweight Introduction of EAST-ADL2 in an Automotive Software Product Line

This paper describes the technical aspects of the transition to a software product line approach in the automotive domain. One major challenge is the current existence of two different emerging standards for this domain, AUTOSAR and EAST-ADL2. These potential standards should be borne in mind during the software product line introduction because they may someday become mandatory. In addition, the existing development process should be changed as little as possible, and one final important requirement for the software product line is the implementation of a single point of control to ensure consistency between various development artifacts. To this end, we propose a lightweight introduction of EAST-ADL2 as a documentation tool only as an initial step. This is achieved by extracting structural information from AUTOSAR models and automatically generating the corresponding EAST-ADL2 representation. The automatic generation ensures consistency between AUTOSAR and EAST-ADL2 models. As an important side effect, variability information can be extracted in this transformation step and used to build an EAST-ADL2 compositional variability model. This model can then be mapped to the central domain model and used to configure the EAST-ADL2 documentation to the other development artifacts consistently. In this way, we can accomplish the lightweight introduction of EAST-ADL2 in the development process through the automatic generation and use the generated variability information for configuration from a single control point.