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Emerging technologies provide opportunities for the implementation of advanced car features enhancing the safety and the comfort of the driver, but at the same time, the correct implementation of these features imposes new design challenges on electronics, software, and controls designers due to the large number of in-vehicle computers and serial data communications. In this paper, we propose a comprehensive view of methods and tools that support the designers in facing such challenges. We propose an approach for quantitative architecture exploration based on the scoring of the possible alternatives via metrics of interest, and we illustrate some early results with a case study example.

The advent of active-safety and safety-critical functions, including by-wire systems, and the interdependency of these functions is rapidly changing the scenario of automotive systems. OEMs need to understand and control functional and timing properties, including end-to-end latencies of distributed computations. The evaluation of the timing behavior can be very complex, considering the communication and synchronization model between application tasks, middleware, and network drivers, and the scheduling choices for tasks and messages. In this view, the timing behavior of CAN messages is of very high importance. In this paper we present some of the challenges in the evaluation of CAN message latencies.

Future automobiles are required to support an increasing number of complex, distributed functions such as active safety and X-by-wire. Because of safety concerns and the need to deliver correct designs in a short time, system properties should be verified in advance on function models, by simulation or model checking. To ensure that the properties still hold for the final deployed system, the implementation of the models into tasks and communication messages should preserve properties of the model, or in general, its semantics. FlexRay offers the possibility of deterministic communication and can be used to define distributed implementations that are provably equivalent to synchronous reactive models like those created from Simulink. However, the low level communication layers and the FlexRay schedule must be carefully designed to ensure the preservation of communication flows and functional outputs.