Using Generic Software Components for Safety-Critical Embedded Systems - An Engineering Framework

Modern software development in the automotive domain would be unthinkable without leveraging reusable software components. Such generic software components have to be configured and tailored for each specific target application. Nowadays, complexity has reached a point where developing generic software components and manually adapting each component for each variant in the product family is error-prone and no longer economically feasible. In this article we propose an engineering framework for automated adaptation of generic software components which focuses on temporal and spatial integrity. The framework is built around a generic methodology and leverages specialized software tools to determine an allocation of software components to the resources of an embedded system and to ensure memory integrity. We use real-life examples from the automotive domain, executed on the Infineon AURIX TC277 processor under the AUTOSAR operating system to illustrate our approach.