Automotive

While the development of electronic systems for aeronautic and railway applications are following mature processes supervised by independent safety authorities and have reached high standards for passenger safety, the aggregated effect of increased traffic density and increased system complexity poses major challenges to maintain, let alone reduce current accident rates. In the automotive sector, while the development of active and passive safety systems has drastically reduced accident rates, there is a recognized need for ensuring higher degrees of dependability and reliability, including the need to define standardized requirements on processes and methods akin to those observed in other transportation systems.

The automotive sector contributes to 15% of the global GDP, and is currently producing 57 Million light vehicles per year. The anticipated growth rate for electronic components until 2015 is estimated to be 150%. Only if significant reductions in costs and development times can be achieved, German automotive industries will maintain their leading market positions as drivers for innovation in electronic components and reach these targeted growth rates. A further driver for innovation is the need to support forthcoming adaptations of IEC 61508, leading to SIL-level dependent requirements on processes and demonstration of safety cases, a key challenge being to provide the required degree of safety at affordable costs. The strategic goals of the automotive segment to achieve a 50% fatality reduction by 2010 require a holistic approach to accident prevention, inducing key challenges on components, methods, and processes. One of the main tasks will be to incorporate the needs, abilities and weaknesses of the human operator in the different stages of the design process.

Example Projects

Speeds. Speeds is a concerted effort to define the new generation of methodologies, processes and supporting tools for safety-critical embedded system design. They will enable European systems industry to evolve from model-based design of hardware/software systems, towards integrated component based construction of complete virtual system models. Speeds aims at improving substantially the competitiveness of the European industry in this critical economic sector by marrying design competence with deep technical insights and theoretical foundations. Speeds partners are companies active in the entire supply chain: OEMs, suppliers, and tool vendors, supported by leading European research institutions.

H-Metaphor and H-MODE. Complex technology can sometimes be simplified with a design metaphor. An example is the PC, where the interaction is based on the desktop metaphor. An example in transportation is the H-Metaphor, which is based on the interaction of a horse and its rider. Initially described by NASA and DLR, the H-Metaphor is used to develop a universal language “H-Mode”, to drive or fly intelligent vehicles intuitively and safely (funded by DFG).

Virtual Institut Human Automation. Within the "Virtual Institute Human Automation in Traffic" the Helmholtz Association funds the cooperation of the DLR Institute of Transportation Systems, the Institute of Automotive Engineering at the RWTH Aachen and the Interdisciplinary Center for Traffic Sciences (University of Würzburg), which cooperate in a research project where the functionality of advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) is adapted to situational factors like traffic density. From an analysis of driving behaviour, requirements for ADAS are developed and demonstrated in a prototype.

Sparc. This EU-project led by Daimler is developing a semi-automated truck and car to provide assistance and automation for lane keeping, breaking and obstacle avoidance. DLR’s task is to develop the interaction strategy.

EASIS - Electronic Architecture and System Engineering for Integrated Safety Systems (EU – IST). While today there are already many safety systems integrated into the car, further improvement can be achieved by a close coupling of the various systems combined with new telematics services. The implementation of such integrated safety systems requires a powerful and highly reliable electronics architecture as well as support for the development process. These elements must be standardized to achieve an improvement in system quality with shorter development times and lower system costs. The goal of the EASIS project is to define and develop these enabling technologies.

Strategies for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS). In this project funded by the Ministry of Economics, Labor and Traffic of Lower Saxony a model is developed to derive strategies for the human-machine-interface of ADAS in accordance to driver characteristics, the current driver situation and the state of the surrounding. The model is tested empirically using simulators and demonstrators.

Speak2. A project jointly funded by BMBF and Bosch aiming at specification and algorithm/architecture co-design for highly complex applications in automotive and communication. New modelling, specification and design languages, methodologies and tools promise to close the design gap. Various approaches like C/C++-based system description, UML, SDL and Matlab/Simulink are regarded in this project. The SPEAK 2 goal is to evaluate these new languages, methodologies and especially the available design tools, focusing on the integration into current industrial design flows. The evaluation is based on industrial automotive applications.

LEMOS. This project is partly funded by the BMBF and is conducted with industrial partners: Bosch, Catena, ChipVision, Infineon, and Nokia. OFFIS is the scientific coordinator of the project and subcontractor of ChipVision and Infineon. The objective is to develop new design methodologies and tools to enable reliable and available mobile systems in the communication and automotive domain by reducing their power consumption. Special consideration is on the dynamic power of busses and memory accesses as well as on power analysis of entire SoCs (Systems on Chip).

Verisoft - Beweisen als Ingenieurwissenschaft (BMBF). The goal of this project is to demonstrate that the correctness of a complete system – from the application level down to the hardware – can be formally verified. One of its subprojects deals with an automotive system. Verification of ECU hardware is performed by Infineon. Higher levels as bus protocols, operating systems and application layers are studied by University of Saarland, Technical University of Munich and OFFIS.

Link Menü

Alternativ gelangen Sie auch hier zu den verschiedenen Anwendungsdomänen und Forschungsgebieten.

• Anwendungsdomänen
  • Automotive
  • Avionics
  • Railway Systems
• Forschungsgebiete
  • Human Centered Engineering
  • System/Embedded Software Development Process
  • Safety and Certification Process