INVITED: Specification, Verification and Design of Evolving Automotive Software

Modern automotive systems consist of hundreds of functionalities implemented in software. Moreover, these functionalities are constantly evolving with increasing demand for automation, industry competition and changing sensor and actuator capabilities. Correspondingly, it is important to adapt the engineering and software development processes for such systems to consider fast management of this evolution at minimum cost. Towards this, in this paper, we outline three different problems in the context of evolving automotive software and discuss potential solutions for each of them. First, we outline a framework that can accommodate variability in specifications while developing software for automotive product lines. Secondly, a technique is illustrated to addresses after-sales addition of new features in existing systems by studying corresponding acceptable performance degradation of existing functionalities. Finally, we discuss how an inconsistency management framework and regression verification can ensure consistent evolution of engineering processes for automotive mechatronic systems.