Collaborative Development of Safety-Critical Automotive Systems: Exchange, Views and Metrics

Automotive system development involves a large set of organizations and disciplines. In particular, vehicle manufacturers rely on a large set of suppliers to provide components and systems. To successfully develop and integrate these components, stakeholders exchange requirement specifications that define in detail the component properties. Because of the complexity of a typical automotive system, requirement specifications are error prone and time consuming to negotiate with a correct result. In addition, most systems have safety implications and require rigorous means to achieve and argue safety. Recent autonomous and semi-autonomous systems are particularly complex and critical. The Synligare project addresses these challenges by providing model-based technologies to assist collaborative development of safety critical systems. The project is working along three lines as explained below. Model Exchange: Being able to exchange models rather than documents to convey engineering information improves efficiency and precision in collaboration between stakeholders. Version and variant information is an important aspect to secure validity of information. Views: Understanding system solutions and analysis results is difficult as more and more aspects need to be considered. Appropriate views, based on formalized system representations, makes engineering information more accessible. Metrics: Development status and system properties can sometimes be represented and tracked by means of metrics. Such automatically and continuously provided measures, makes development effort more predictable and indirectly ensure safety. This paper will describe aspects on exchange, views and metrics identified in the Synligare project, and illustrate with examples how it can be applied in practical system development.