AUTOSAR Software Architecture Modeling of Multicore Electric Powertrain Software

Green roads are of vital importance and are achievable by electrical propulsion systems. The electrical powertrain system is driven and controlled by a liquid-cooled, high-voltage inverter. The inverter control software is designed and developed using MATLAB^® and Simulink^®. MATLAB now includes software architecture authoring capabilities through the recently released System Composer™ and AUTOSAR Blockset™. We are one of the pioneers in using these capabilities for our inverter control software development activities.

In this talk, we share our live project experience in transforming from a legacy approach to a MATLAB and Simulink approach for the software architecture, including the lessons we learned and explorations. In the past, we have used software architecture authoring tools mainly for diagrams and then took them to the requirements database manually. There were no linkages from software requirements to software architectural design, and there was no way to establish the bidirectional traceability between requirements and software architecture. Also, the legacy toolchain was not well suited to AUTOSAR compliant architectural diagrams. With the help of Siemens^® Polarion™ ALM Connector for Simulink, as well as System Composer and AUTOSAR Blockset, we addressed these gaps. This seamless approach also helped us to publish the software architecture from the design environment to the requirement database easily. Updated requirements can easily be pushed to design, and this updated architecture can also be published back to the requirements database. Finally, the whole approach helps to generate software architecture documents more conveniently, and that drives the software design and further stages of development lifecycle.