A Component Model for the AUTOSAR Virtual Function Bus

To reduce cost and time to market of automotive software systems and simultaneously increase the products´ quality, the component paradigm has achieved broad acceptance within the automotive industry over the last few years. This fact is reflected by upcoming domain specific software standards like AUTOSAR. In AUTOSAR application concerns are covered by software components, while infrastructural ones are handled within layered component middleware. The so obtained separation of concerns leads to an increase in application quality, reusability and maintainability, and hence to a reduction of cost and time to market. This paper contributes with the consequent application of the component paradigm to AUTOSAR´s layered middleware, thereby gaining all benefits of CBSE not only for the application level, but for the whole automotive software system. The introduced component model for middleware components can flexibly be used to build resource-aware, AUTOSAR compliant, component middleware for distributed automotive software systems and can seamlessly be integrated within the AUTOSAR system architecture.