Quality assurance and certification of software modules

More than 70 electronic control units (ECU’s) serve for safety and comfort functions in a luxury car. Communicating over different bus systems (e.g. CAN class C and B, LIN, MOST, Bluetooth) on one hand many ECU’s are dealing with close loop control functions as well as reactive functions and do have many safety critical hard real time constraints (thus the software is running under a real time operating and network management system like OSEK/VDX on a standard hardware platform), on the other hand ECU’s controlling on board entertainment/office systems are software intensive, incorporating millions of lines of code. All the different buses are connected through a central gateway, thus enabling the communication of all ECU’s.