Home // International Journal On Advances in Software, volume 10, numbers 3 and 4, 2017 // View article

Control Mechanisms for Managed Evolution of Automotive Software Product Line Architectures

Authors:
Christoph Knieke
Marco Körner
Andreas Rausch
Mirco Schindler
Arthur Strasser
Martin Vogel

Keywords: Architecture Conformance Checking; Architecture Description Language; Software Product Lines; Automotive Software Engineering

Abstract:
The high time and cost pressure in the automotive market encourages reuse of components and software in different vehicle projects leading to a high degree of variability within the software. Often, a product line approach is used to handle variability. However, the increasing complexity and degree of variability of automotive software systems hinders the capabilities for reusability and extensibility of these systems to an increasing degree. After several product generations, software erosion is growing steadily, resulting in an increasing effort of reusing software components, and planning of further development. Here, we propose control mechanisms for a managed evolution of automotive software product line architectures. We introduce a description language and its meta model for the specification of the software product line architecture and the software architecture of the corresponding products. Based on the description language we propose an approach for architecture conformance checking to identify architecture violations as a means to prevent architecture erosion. We demonstrate our methodology on a real world case study, a brake servo unit (BSU) software system from automotive software engineering. To show the benefits of our approach, we define several metrics on architecture and software level and apply the metrics on the BSU example.

Pages: 191 to 210

Copyright: Copyright (c) to authors, 2017. Used with permission.

Publication date: December 31, 2017

Published in: journal

ISSN: 1942-2628