Automobile: Aircraft or Smartphone? Modeling Challenges and Opportunities in Automotive Systems

Automotive systems are turning out to be one of the most complex consumer electronic systems being ever built. For the modern day users, they are products like smartphones and tablets but in size, complexity and quality and safety requirements they match if not exceed aircraft, and similar high integrity systems. Many of the major advances in Software engineering like model based development, platform based design and product line engineering have been introduced in the development of automotive electronic and software subsystems, which involve million lines of code and tens of electronic control units interconnected with multiple communication buses. This talk will highlight the challenges, current practices and new developments in the industry in building next generation automotive software from the modeling and analysis perspective. The challenges include traditional issues like system integration and feature interaction arising out of the federated development model, heterogeneity in subsystem behavior, time and space distributed development of software and the recent and rapidly increasing demand for advanced driver assistance features and system level requirements like fault tolerance and security. The talk attempts to outline a set of requirements for modeling from the perspective of system design and analysis. The talk will also touch upon some of the research and developments efforts currently ongoing within and with our external partners to meet these challenges.