Use Cases of a Generic Model Interpreter in an Automotive Software Setting
Jochen Quante · 2016
Model based approaches are widely used to develop today's automotive software systems. They promise to reduce development effort by raising the level of abstraction and making the software better accessible to domain experts. On the other hand, the same effects as for classical code occur: Complexity inevitably increases over time, and models become hard to understand. This is where software analysis can help. Other use cases of software analysis, like test case generation or quality assurance, are of similar importance. Unfortunately, only limited support by analysis tools is available on model level - mainly because each modeling language is different and would require a specific analysis tool. Analyzing the generated code is also not an option, because that code can be arbitrarily far away from the models. We introduce an abstract model interpreter as a way to get out of this situation. It exploits the specialties of automotive embedded software and allows efficient realization of a whole class of software analyses on the model level. In this paper, we introduce the ideas of the interpreter and describe some of its real-world use cases for software maintenance and calibration.