With a growing demand for complex, safety-critical features in automotive vehicles, functional safety is a key issues of automotive software development. Consequently, standards like ISO26262 propose methods and techniques for the systematic development of automotive software. Furthermore, the growing amount of functionality -- including active safety systems or automated driver assistance functions -- on the control of the vehicle dynamics and the correspondingly used more powerful electronic platforms requires methods supporting the development of systems in an increasingly complex design space. In this contribution, an approach is presented that supports the allocation of software functions to hardware elements in an automated fashion, respecting the separation constraints concerning assurances levels.

Model-Driven Development (MDD) is no longer a novel development paradigm. It has become mature from a research perspective and recent studies show its adoption in industry. Still, some issues remain a challenge. Among them, we are interested in the treatment of non-functional requirements (NFRs) in MDD processes. Very few MDD approaches have been reported to deal with NFRs (and they do it in a limited way). However, it is clear that NFRs need to be considered somehow in the final product of the MDD process. To better understand how NFRs are integrated into the existing MDD approaches, we have initiated the NFR4MDD project, a multi-national empirical study, based on interviews with companies working on MDD projects. Our project aims at surveying the state of the practice for this topic. In this paper, we summarize our research protocol and present the current status of our study. The discussion will focus on the peculiarities of our study's context and organization involving about 20 researchers from 8 European countries.

With the increased use of model-based techniques and the provision of domain-specific languages, the focus of the development process is shifting from the implementation to the analysis and the design phase. With this shift from the general-purpose, technical-oriented solution space to the application-specific, domain-oriented problem space, new possibilities of application open up for rigorous engineering techniques, both on the analysis and on the synthesis side of applications.

Due to their pivotal role in software engineering, considerable effort is spent on the quality assurance of software requirements specifications. As they are mainly described in natural language, relatively few means of automated quality assessment exist. However, we found that clone detection, a technique widely applied to source code, is promising to assess one important quality aspect in an automated way, namely redundancy that stems from copy&paste operations. This paper describes a large-scale case study that applied clone detection to 28 requirements specifications with a total of 8,667 pages. We report on the amount of redundancy found in real-world specifications, discuss its nature as well as its consequences and evaluate in how far existing code clone detection approaches can be applied to assess the quality of requirements specifications in practice.

Driven by market needs and laws, automotive manufacturers develop ever more feature-rich and complex vehicles. This new functionality plays even an active role in driving, what poses many new challenges on assuring the safety of the vehicle. Safety cases constitute a proven technique to systematically use existing information about a system, its environment, and development context to show its safety. We construct the safety case for a cruise control system describe in a case study in the automotive domain with a special consideration of existing domain-specific models. In the case study, we identify generic safety case modules and several reoccurring patterns, which will simplify the development of future automotive safety cases.

Model-based development is becoming an increasingly common development methodology. In important domains like embedded systems already major parts of the code are generated from models specified with domain-specific modelling languages. Hence, such models are nowadays an integral part of the software development and maintenance process and therefore have a major economic and strategic value for the software-developing organisations. Nevertheless almost no work has been done on a quality defect that is known to seriously hamper maintenance productivity in classic code-based development: Cloning. This paper presents an approach for the automatic detection of clones in large models as they are used in model-based development of control systems. The approach is based on graph theory and hence can be applied to most graphical data-flow languages. An industrial case study demonstrates the applicability of our approach for the detection of clones in Matlab/Simulink models that are widely used in model-based development of embedded systems in the automotive domain.

The paper describes first results from the AutoMoDe (automotive model-based development) project. The project's overall goal is to develop an integrated methodology for model-based development of automotive control software, based on problem-specific design notations with an explicit formal foundation. Based on the existing AutoFOCUS framework (Huber, F. et al., 1997), a tool prototype is being developed in order to illustrate and validate the key elements of our approach.