Software for Automotive Systems: Model-Integrated Computing

Embedded Automotive systems are becoming increasingly complex, and as such difficult to design and develop. Model-based approaches are gaining foothold in this area, and increasingly the system design and development is being conducted with model-based tools, most notably Matlab® Simulink® and Stateflow® from Mathworks Inc., among others. However, these tools are addressing only a limited aspect of the system design. Moreover, there is a lack of integration between these tools, which makes overall system design and development cumbersome and error-prone. Motivated by these shortcomings we have developed an approach, based on Model-Integrated Computing, a technology matured over a decade of research at ISIS, Vanderbilt University. The center-piece of this approach is a graphical modeling language, Embedded Control Systems Language for Distributed Processing (ECSL-DP). A suite of translators and tools have been developed that facilitate the integration of ECSL-DP with industry standard Simulink and Stateflow tools, and open the possibility for integration of other tools, by providing convenient and extensible interfaces. A code generator has been developed that synthesizes implementation code, configuration and firmware glue-code from models. The approach has been prototyped and evaluated with a medium scale example. The results demonstrate the promise of the approach, and points to interesting directions for further research.