Fields of activity of BMW Car IT.

Software Development.

Software Development Process Software Handling Deterministic Software Development	Software Infrastructure AUTOSAR-Basics
	Human Machine Interface Infrastructures
	Increasing functional networking: e.g. Driver Assistance Systems
Rationales for architectural decisions   Prototyping

Work areas of BMW Car IT.

(1) Systemwide Timing and Scheduling

We work on techniques to automatically calculate a schedule for the communication between different electronic control units. We follow a model-based approach, where a logical model describes the dependencies between the functions on the different electronic control units.

(2) Deterministic Development Process

In this area, we aim to create a continuous development process that seamlessly integrates the various development phases. These phases include iterations of requirements collection and analysis, specification, design, implementation and test. The core of such a continuous development process are models of the system that is to be developed. Domain-dependent modeling and specification formalisms may be appropriate for different automotive domains.

The technologies developed and applied in this context include, for example, automatic or semi-automatic code generation and deduction of test cases from declarative models such as function networks, hierarchical state machines or UML models.

(3) Software and Hardware Architectures

The development of today’s complex and highly integrated systems poses new requirements regarding software and hardware architecture. In order to try out ideas and concepts for such architectures, we build reference architectures and evaluate them with respect to specific requirements.

Standardization of software components and their interfaces (e.g., AUTOSAR) is a key factor in being able to handle complex networks of software functions. The decoupling of software from hardware enables the OEM to quickly react to new hardware and software trends and flexibly exploit new options. Important prerequisites of such flexibility are modular software architectures as well as tailored development processes.

(4) Central vs. peripheral Architectural-Design

In this subject area different E/E-architectures are prototypically designed and evaluated. E.g. it is evaluated how far the management of complexity of the architecture and the development-process as well as the in field service (affected by the architecture), can be optimized by the use of partially-centralised architectures with so-called domain main computers.

(5) Vehicle-System-Management

In this context a vehicle-system-management is designed and verified that implements the consistent interpretation of "Cross Cutting Concerns" on system level (e.g. vehicle states, personalisation data, environmental data) as well as the consistent propagation of these concerns to the other nodes in the system.

(6) Detailed topics of Virtual Integration

The goal of the virtual integration is to ensure the integration and collaboration of distributed functions already during their development phase at an early point in time even before the implementations of the nodes are available. Thereby the relations between the distributed functions are determined and their appropriate interfaces are designed and validated. In various domains different aspects are focused, for example in the scope of human-machine-interfaces an important aspect is the rapid prototyping regarding the usability of the system whereas in the domain of control engineering the focus is directed rather to timing-issues.

(7) Test-Automation of highly integrated systems

Methodologies and support-tools are developed which systematically/automatically generate high quality test-cases from a model based specification in order to test an implementation with these test-cases against the required behaviour as described by the model based specification.

(8) Intelligent Mobility Infrastructure

The aim is to create an infrastructure facilitating the rapid and efficient implementation of new features supporting the mobility of vehicle users. In an increasingly connected world, mobility affects a variety of domains: automotive, consumer electronic devices, internet, business and home. By connecting these domains new functions can be realized : functions created from the combination of several domains, or functions that can be used across all domains. It is essential that these functions and solutions are as simple and transparent to use. The goal is to investigate and implement an infrastructure promoting an open architecture for flexible application integration, including the architecture design within each domain, as well as the interaction interfaces between domains.