Software Component Technologies for Heavy Vehicles

Control-systems for heavy vehicles have advanced from an area where mainly mechanic and hydraulic solutions were used, to a highly computerised domain using distributed embedded real-time computer systems.To cope with the increasing level of end-customer demands on advanced features and functions in future vehicle systems, sophisticated development techniques are needed. The development techniques must support software in numerous configurations and facilitate development of systems with requirements on advanced functionality, timeliness, and safety-criticality. In order to meet these requirements, we propose the use of component-based software engineering.However, the software component-technologies available on the market have not yet been generally accepted by the vehicular industry. In order to better understand why this is the case, we have conduced a survey - identifying the industrial requirements that are deemed decisive for introducing a component technology. We have used these requirements to evaluate a number of existing component technologies, and one of our conclusions is that none of the studied technologies is a perfect match for the industrial requirements.In addition, we have implemented and evaluated the novel component model SaveCCM, which has been designed for safety-critical automotive applications. Our evaluation indicates that SaveCCM is a promising technology which has the potential to fulfil the industrial requirements. However, tools are still immature and incomplete.In the final part of this work, we propose the use of monitored software components, as a general approach for engineering of embedded systems. In our approach, a component's execution is continuously monitored and experience regarding the behaviour is accumulated. As more and more experience is collected the confidence in the component grows.