Architecture Centric Modeling of Automotive Control Software

Within the automotive industry model-based specification techniques are the basis for the definition of seamless design processes allowing the complete, the consistent, and the unambiguous specification of software and hardware parts of car specific networks of control units. For a successful application, those modeling approaches have to give methodical support for adequately capturing the architecture in the targeted system class. In our opinion most standard modeling languages leave room for improvement exactly at this point. Therefore we develop a modeling language characterized by the following features: (1) architecture centric modeling, (2) domain-specificity, and (3) close relation to standard modeling languages. Within this article we introduce the Automotive Modeling Language (AML) by illustrating a case study which comprises parts of the body car electronics within a car. Architecture related modeling concepts are discussed in detail by showing the correlation between their UML representation and their ASCET-SD representation.