Modeling requirements of automotive software with an extended EAST-ADL2 architecture description language

Modeling software requirements is one of the grand challenges of ECU (Electronic Control Unit) development for vehicular applications. One of the main problems in this domain is: How to organize the large amount of complicated software requirements with a concise and manageable means. EAST-ADL2, as an architecture description language dedicated to automotive electronic systems, is well-suitable for describing the system structures, however it has no facilities for the system behavioral and communication aspects. In this paper, we extend the EAST-ADL2 language with timed automata and signal matrix to form a multiview requirement modeling language. Furthermore, we use a theory of 4-variable requirement model to link these three formalisms together to form a consistent and complete understanding of automotive software requirements. The proposed modeling framework takes the advantages that: (1) it allows us to separate the whole requirements into three complementary aspects: structure, timing behavior and communication signals, which combined together to form a complete and consistent software requirements; (2) it builds numerous formal relationships, which can be checked furthermore for requirement verifications.