Application of Aspect-based Modeling and Weaving for Complexity Reduction in Development of Automotive Distributed Real-time Embedded System

To meet the stringent resource and costs constraints in developing modern automotive embedded electronic systems requires careful consideration of various aspects, such as the target hardware structure, component collaboration model, and timing models. An emerging trend in automotive systems is to apply Model-Driven Development (MDD) to understand and formalize these aspects. The growing size and complexity of automotive systems, however, can yield models that are hard to develop and evolve manually without violating domain constraints, such as resource allocation limits. This paper presents our experiences applying aspect-oriented design and modeling to develop a component-based distributed real-time embedded (DRE) automotive system. We summarize our findings and show the key technological shortcomings with conventional weaving approaches that make it hard to leverage the full power of AOSD to design and model large-scale DRE systems. We also evaluate the effectiveness of various aspect merging techniques to help overcome these shortcomings.