AUTOSAR meets Fjällbacka

The Willert AUTOSAR Team (Clemens Maas and me) regularly visit the AUTOSAR meetings. (See: AUTOSAR WebSite)

Since our succesful introduction of Rhapsody @ Marquardt (See: Referenzstudie (German) ) we do more and more Automotive. The increase of software in cars is helping us to more and more Automotive customers that are all struggling to create their software in time and without (greater) errors.

AUTOSAR is the Automotive worlds standard to improve software development. It is an organisation that is founded by the major (mostly German) Car manufacturers. You can become a member and in that way cooperate and contribute to the software standard.

What does this have to do with Rhapsody? Good question…. I’d say: everything. With Rhapsody (UML or SysML) yo can also improve your software quality, time to market, re-use and more. The combination of both worlds is, however, not really easy.

Many AUTOSAR artefacts look like UML or SysML artefacts but are different. Rhapsody is used to store everything in its own database (not a real database but it’s own file format) and not used to export stuff to cooperate with other tools like MatLab. This is something that is defined in AUTOSAR, the ARXML files that you exchange on all levels for information interchange between tools.

Rhapsody has an AUTOSAR profile that allows the import and export of ARXML files. When you want to use Rhapsody for Architecture you can then export your Rhapsody model as ARXML to do further work in other tools. The other way around is also possible, you can draw your architecture in a Vector or Elektrobit tool, export ARXML, import that in Rhapsody and then create RIMBOs to add behavioral elements.

Sounds complicated and… unfortunately…. it is. We at Willert have designed an “AUTOSAR light” solution that allows the use of Rhapsody on a much simpler level. We import ARXML but convert all items to standard UML items. You can add behavior in a normal Rhapsody way, generate code and… it works. in the current version you have to do some stuff by hand but we are working on automating that as well.

So….back to Fjällbacka… a very nice town, we can recommend a visit!