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Automotive embedded systems have become very complex, are strongly integrated, and the safety-criticality and real-time constraints of these systems raise new challenges. The OSEK/VDX standard provides an open-ended architecture for distributed real-time capable units in vehicles. This is supported by the OSEK Implementation Language (OIL), a language aiming at specifying the configuration of these real-time operating systems. The challenge, however, is to ensure consistency of the concept constraints and configurations along the entire product development. The contribution of this paper is to bridge the existing gap between model-driven systems engineering and software engineering for automotive real-time operating systems (RTOS). For this purpose a bidirectional tool bridge has been established based on OSEK OIL exchange format files.

Advanced functionalities unthinkable a few decades ago are now being introduced into automotive vehicles through embedded systems for reasons like emission control, vehicle connectivity, safety and cooperative behaviors. As the development often involves stakeholders from different engineering disciplines and organizations, the complexity due to shared requirements, interdependencies of data, functions, and resources, as well as tight constraints in regards to timing, safety, and resource efficiency makes the system integration, quality control and assurance, reuse and change management increasingly more difficult. This calls for a more rigorous approach to the development of automotive embedded systems and components.

Increasing demands for safety, security, and certifiability of embedded automotive systems require additional development effort to generate the required evidences that the developed system can be trusted for the application and environment it is intended for. Safety standards such as ISO 26262 for road vehicles have been established to provide guidance during the development of safety-critical systems. The challenge in this context is to provide evidence of consistency, correctness, and completeness of system specifications over different work-products. One of these required work-products is the hardware-software interface (HSI) definition. This work-product is especially important since it defines the interfaces between different technologies. Model-based development (MBD) is a promising approach to support the description of the system under development in a more structured way, thus improving resulting consistency.