Evolution of Long-Term Industrial Meta-Models – A Case Study

Other conference contribution, 2014

Meta-models in software engineering are used to define properties of models. Therefore the evolution of the metamodels 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 longterm 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 the automotive software designers in planning long term development projects based on multiple AUTOSAR meta-model versions. We achieve this by visualizing the size and complexity increase between different versions of the AUTOSAR meta-model and by calculating the number of changes which need to be implemented in order to adopt a newer AUTOSAR meta-model version. The analysis is done for each major role in the automotive development process affected by the changes.