Software Engineering for Embedded Systems: Chapter 22. Embedded Software for Automotive Applications

This chapter introduces the automotive system, which is unlike any other, characterized by its rigorous planning, architecting, development, testing, validation and verification. The physical task of writing embedded software for automotive applications versus other application areas is not significantly different from other embedded systems, but the key differences are the quality standards which must be followed for any development and test project. To write automotive software the engineer needs to understand how and why the systems have evolved into the complex environment it is today. They must be aware of the differences and commonalties between the automotive submarkets. They must be familiar with the applicable quality standards and why such strict quality controls exist, along with how quality is tested and measured, all of which are described in this chapter with examples of the most common practices. This chapter introduces various processes to help software engineers write high-quality, fault-tolerant, interoperable code such as modeling, autocoding and advanced trace and debug assisted by the emergence of the latest AUTOSAR and ISO26262 standards, as well as more traditional standards such as AEC, OBD-II and MISRA.