Analysis and validation of AUTOSAR models

As the rise of single-core processing power is exhausted due to technical limitations, the automotive branch is forced to migrate its control unit software to architectures that feature multiple Independent Execution Units (IEUs). This policy shift brings along new problems resulting from the tremendously increased complexity of such systems. Facing these challenges, software engineers have to cope with possible data inconsistencies caused by, e.g., race conditions or cycles. Being an important and standardized software architecture for electronic control units, the Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) provides the basis for tools that support the complexity handling when migrating to architectures with multiple IEUs. Our concept is realized by a tool that executes data dependency analyses directly on AUTOSAR models, determines critical dependencies, automatically solves trivial problems and provides semi-automatic resolution of advanced conflicts. To support the actual parallelization of the system, the tool additionally determines groups of executable units that are suitable to run on a common IEU. This appreciably facilitates the validation of AUTOSAR models and the search for a good mapping of the processing tasks to IEUs.