SystemC based simulation of AUTOSAR software components

AUTOSAR is a software methodology commonly used in automotive software system design and implementation. It provides high level of abstraction for the designer through the concept of software components (SWC) and virtual function bus (VFB). Unfortunately, no mature simulation tool is available to simulate the system at the VFB level which disables evaluating the model before system integration. On the other hand, SystemC provides a framework to simulate, analyze, and verify software. Besides, it considers the timing behavior of hardware and communication buses. The similarities and analogies between SystemC modeling components and AUTOSAR software component (SWC) modeling encourages us to rely on SystemC to propose a flow to the designer of AUTOSAR system for timing simulation purpose. In this paper, we present a tool that uses SystemC simulation kernel to provide quick simulation for the designer of Automotive based systems.