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Model-based development and autocoding have become common practice in the automotive industry over the past few years. The industry is using these methods to tackle a situation in which complexity is constantly growing and development times are constantly decreasing, while the safety requirements for the software stay the same or even increase. The debate is no longer whether these methods are useful, but rather on the conditions for achieving optimum results with them. From the experiences made during the last decade this paper shows some of the key factors helping to achieve success when introducing or extending the deployment of automatic code generation in a model-based design process.

Model-based software development and automatic production code generation have become increasingly established in recent years. The aerospace industry and other industries, such as automotive, have widely adopted and successfully deployed these methods in many different series production programs worldwide. This brought various benefits, such as a reduction in development times and improved quality due to more precise specifications, and early verification and validation by means of simulation. Model-based development is a general purpose development approach which can be applied to a wide variety of applications. Safety-critical systems, like found in aerospace applications to a large extent, but also found increasingly more often in other industries, like automotive or medical devices, pose special additional requirements to this process. This paper describes how model-based design and automatic production code generation can be applied to the development of safety-critical software.

Automatic code generation is an established technology in automotive and aerospace industries that is also adopted in commercial vehicle embedded software development. Code generation brings the productivity gains of model-based algorithm design to the next stage of the process – production software development. The technology has matured to the point where it satisfies most technical and usability requirements and the success of code generation depends on judicious deployment, efficient work practices and acceptance by all users involved. It has been demonstrated that model-based software development and code generation in particular can shorten development cycles while staying true to the requirements and maintaining software quality through multiple algorithm iterations. These gains, though, only come as a result of careful combination of tools and methods. This paper discusses solutions to common organizational and technical challenges of model-based software development.