Portable Automotive Electronic Models using Standard XML Technologies
Syed Maqsood Zia, Akbar Zaidi · 2002
Today embedded systems are everywhere. They control most of the devices around us, from phones to vehicles. This thesis concentrates on automotive electronic systems, which are a special class of embedded systems that are responsible for controlling the functionality of a vehicle. Automotive electronic systems are complex distributed systems that have important requirements on performance, safety and cost. Designing and developing such systems is not the sole responsibility of the vehicle manufacturer. Suppliers provide many of the components, and the task of the manufacturer is to design, develop and integrate different systems. Until now, the design of embedded systems has concentrated on developing systems that perform as efficiently as possible their dedicated functions. However, with the increase in complexity, other issues like the formal modeling of the requirements and the interoperability between the manufacturer and the suppliers become important. In this thesis we have addressed the problems of interoperability and modeling of the requirements by using standard XML technologies. Thus, we have defined a simple architecture definition language (ADL) used to model the automotive electronic systems. Our simple ADL has an XML representation that makes the models portable among manufacturers and suppliers. Not only the portability of models is important, but also of the immense requirements. Our major contribution is the modeling and representation of automotive electronic requirements using XML technologies like xlinkit, XQuery and CommonRules. Our approach has been validated through an industrial case study representing a vehicle cruise controller. The cruise controller has been modeled using our ADL, and the requirements placed on the cruise controller have been modeled using xlinkit, XQuery and CommonRules.