APESER 2010 Keynote Speech: Marco Di Natale

Automotive systems have been on the forefront in the development of standards for real-time operating systems and in the use of model-based development of software. However, due to the limited amount of distribution and concurrency, the implications in the generation of software implementations of control functions with real-time constraints have been scantly analyzed until now. Today, the scenario is rapidly evolving while adding further complexity, with the integration of the upcoming AUTOSAR standard for the definition of application-level components and automotive software/hardware architectures. This talk will outline some of the challenges and possible solutions for the development of modern automotive systems in a model-based flow. Also, most of the problems related to the need of preserving model semantics while offering an efficient (real-time) software implementation are common to other domains, including aeronautics and control automation. The model-based development of complex distributed embedded systems requires a much tighter integration of competencies in controls, formal methods and software architectures and platforms, which will require substantial innovation in the education programs and immediate help from the research community.