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Model-based software development and automatic code generation have become increasingly established in recent years. The automotive industry has 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, improved quality due to more precise specifications, and early verification and validation by means of simulation. At the same time, more and more safety-related and safety-critical systems have been - and will be -introduced into modern vehicles. Common examples are active front steering, adaptive cruise-control, and integrated chassis control. This leads to the question, if and how model-based design and automatic production code generation can be applied to the development of safety-critical systems.

This paper will first introduce and classify the basic principles of architecture-driven software development and will briefly sketch the presumed development process. This background information is then used to explain extensions which enable current behavior modeling and code generation tools to operate as software component generators. The generation of AUTOSAR software components using dSPACE's production code generator TargetLink is described as an example.

Embedded software in the car is becoming increasingly complex due to the growing number of software-based controller functions and the increasing complexity of the software itself. Model-based development with Simulink combined with TargetLink for automatic code generation helps significantly to improve the quality of the embedded software. The development of large-scale Simulink models in distributed teams is a challenging task, especially when developing safety-critical software that must fulfill requirements stated in the ISO 26262 [1] safety standard. In practice, many questions on how to avoid the pitfalls of distributed model-based development remain open, such as how to define an appropriate model architecture, handle model complexity, and achieve compliance with ISO 26262. The intent of this paper is threefold. Firstly, we summarize those requirements of ISO 26262 that are relevant for developing complex software in a distributed environment.