Method and Tool Support for Automotive Software Engineering
Licentiate thesis, 2010

Modelling is an essential activity in all engineering disciplines, and automotive software engineering is no exception. Model-driven software engineering – which has been shown with extensive evidence to improve efficiency and effectiveness of software development – acknowledges the centrality of models and advocates the use of models as primary development artefacts; it is in the models that work should be done, and other development artefacts – such as requirement specifications, documentation and source code – should be generated from the models. Introducing a model-driven development approach in a previously non model-driven process, however, presents specific challenges to the development organization; there is, furthermore, no consensus in the current state of research how to best make such a transition. In the automotive domain, where software engineering is only one of several engineering disciplines involved in development of the car, best practices for transitioning to a model-driven approach are yet more unclear. In addition, the overarching development paradigm in the automotive domain is often document-centric – i.e. it is in textual documents that development information is officially disseminated in the development organization. Nevertheless, software models have been found to play a central role within projects in the organization. In this thesis, the main research question is: How can model-driven development methods improve the development of automotive software? The approach taken is to acknowledge that the overarching development paradigm will remain unchanged, and to examine how – in the current development practice – software models are used within individual projects. Moreover, the thesis examines how these models relate to the documents in which development information is disseminated in the organization-wide development process. Using triangulation of empirical and theoretical research methods, the results in the thesis show that there can be fundamental differences between an organization-wide process and how that process is implemented within individual project; the results also identify issues related to this fact. The results, furthermore, provide insights into opportunities of how modelling methods may improve the development of automotive software.

Torg 2, Patricia building Lindholmen
Opponent: Prof. Martin Törngren, Department of Machine Design, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

Author

Niklas Mellegård

Chalmers, Computer Science and Engineering (Chalmers)

Characterizing Model Usage in Embedded Software Engineering: A Case Study

8th Nordic Workshop on Model Driven Software Engineering (NW-MoDE),;(2010)

Paper in proceeding

Use of Models in Automotive Software Development: A Case-study

M-BED Workshop on Model Based Engineering for Embedded Systems Design,;(2010)p. 35-39

Paper in proceeding

Improving Efficiency of Change Impact Assessment Using Graphical Requirement Specifications: An Experiment

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics),;Vol. 6156(2010)p. 336-350

Paper in proceeding

Methodology for Requirements Engineering in Model-Based Projects for Reactive Automotive Software

European Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Doctoral symposium,;(2008)

Paper in proceeding

Subject Categories

Software Engineering

Technical report L - Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Chalmers University of Technology and Göteborg University

Torg 2, Patricia building Lindholmen

Opponent: Prof. Martin Törngren, Department of Machine Design, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden

More information

Created

10/6/2017