Evolution of Long-Term Industrial Meta-Models -- An Automotive Case Study of AUTOSAR

Meta-models in software engineering are used to define properties of models. Therefore the evolution of the meta-models influences the evolution of the models and the software instantiated from them. The evolution of the meta-models is particularly problematic if the software has to instantiate two versions of the same meta-model - a situation common for long-term software development projects such as car development projects. In this paper, we present a case study of the evolution of the standardized meta-model used in the development of the automotive software systems - the AUTOSAR meta-model - at Volvo Car Corporation. The objective of this study is to assist automotive software designers in planning long term development projects based on multiple AUTOSAR meta-model versions. We achieve this by performing quantitative analysis of the AUTOSAR meta-model evolution in order to visualize the size and the complexity change between different meta-model versions and calculate the number of changes which need to be implemented to adopt a newer version. The analysis is done for each major role in the automotive development process affected by the changes.