A Process Algebraic Approach to Resource-Parameterized Timing Analysis of Automotive Software Architectures

Abstract

Modern automotive software components are often first developed by different suppliers and then integrated under limited resources by a manufacturer. The integration of software components under various resource configurations is prone to timing errors because the components are resources independently designed by the supplier and viewed by the manufacturer as black boxes during the integration stage, so that imposing resource constraints/requirements on their behavior is a challenge. This paper introduces an engineering awareness environment for the analysis of automotive systems with respect to two perspectives: 1) time-aware design models that correspond to the supplier perspective; and 2) resource-aware design models imposed by the manufacturer during integration. To this end, first we propose two timed behavioral models, a time-constrained model (TcM) and a resource-constrained model (RcM) that are extended from a functional model (FM). A timing analysis of applications can hence be conducted incrementally by adopting the separation of concerns principle coming from the model-driven architectures (MDAs). Second, given a basic application component description of AUTomotive Open System Architecture with timing properties, we specify how to define the behavior of the basic components as process terms using a process algebra, algebra of communicating shared resources with value passing (ACSR-VP), in order to exploit the description capability of the language for both timing aspects and resource-constrained aspects of a system. As a result, a timed behavioral model of a system can be seamlessly refined by various resource configurations, and both platform-independent and platform-dependent timing properties of real-time systems can be analyzed in a consistent and efficient manner