Interoperability issues on the design of safe in-vehicle embedded systems

The design of in-vehicle embedded systems follows a complex multi-partner development process. Carmakers specify the whole system and have to integrate several parts of the system provided by different suppliers. Specification as well as integration are concerned with properties requirements (safety, performance, cost, etc.) and validation issues. On another hand, the economical aspects lead suppliers to reuse previously developped components. At least, the portability of components is a necessary means that enable the flexibility of the development. For short, the problem when developping an automotive embedded system is the interoperability between components. To tackle this problem, two complementary solutions have been proposed by the automotive industry. The first one is the definition of a reference model for embedded systems that identifies component types and the formal rules of their interactions together. The other solution is a modeling language that can be shared by the different actors. In this paper, we show how automotive industry has contributed to these two aspects.