Component Based Middleware-Synthesis for AUTOSAR Basic Software

Distributed real-time automotive embedded systems have to be highly dependable as well as cost-efficient due to the large number of manufactured units. To close the gap between raising complexity and cutting costs, upcoming software standards like AUTOSAR introduce a clear separation of concerns into their system architecture. An AUTOSAR application is built from components that deal with business logic only whereas infrastructural services are provided by standardized middleware. Unfortunately, this middleware tends to be heavy-weight due to its coarse-grained layered design. By applying a component based design to AUTOSAR´s middleware, a custom-tailored version for each specific application and system node can be built to overcome this problem. This paper demonstrates how to automatically synthesize component based middleware via the connector transformation: component connectors in platform independent application models are utilized to automatically assemble platform- and application specific middleware. As a result, AUTOSAR middleware becomes custom-tailored and hence light-weight and flexible. In addition, the described synthesis algorithm is capable of incorporating timing annotations via interface contracts at model level, and thus reflects upcoming ambitions to cover real-time constraints at middleware level within AUTOSAR. To prove our approach we successfully synthesized middleware for a demonstrator application and compared it to its conventional counterpart.