Quality Assurance and Certification of Software Modules in Safety Critical Automotive Electronic Control Units Using a CASE-Tool Integration Platform

Up to 70 electronic control units (ECU's) serve for safety and comfort functions in a car. Communicating over different bus systems most ECU's perform close loop control functions and reactive functions and have to fulfill hard real time constraints. Some ECU's controlling on board entertainment/office systems are software intensive, incorporating millions of lines of code. The challenge for the design of those distributed and networked control units is to define all requirements and constraints, understand and analyze those manifold interactions between the control units, the car and the environment (driver, road, weather) in normal as well as stress situations (crash). To improve the design of safety critical ECU's we propose an enhanced development process (double-V-model). The use of different modeling descriptions for closed loop control, reactive systems and software intensive systems requires a CASE-tool integration platform. We have developed "GeneralStore" as a platform to support model driven design with heterogeneous models in a design process which is concurrent and distributed between the automotive manufacturer and several suppliers.