The planning was to have a more quit week with less travelling. As usual, this did not work out well. As my good friend Bruce always says: The difference between theory and praxis is a lot larger in praxis than it is in theory. No problem, I’m used to that.

On Tuesday, at least that is what Clemens thought, we had a common AUTOSAR Meeting. We are AUTOSAR Premium Member (by proxy of Sodius) so we visit the meetings and we try to influence the process of the AUTOSAR specification.

So on Tuesday morning very early we drove from the apartment in Bückeburg to dSpace in Paderborn where the meeting was held.

There it turned out that Clemens made a tiny mistake. He assumed that all meetings had the same footprint during the week which was wrong. (As _I_ always say: Assumption is the mother of all f***-ups) So after a Tuesday full of very very in-depth AUTOSAR workgroup meetings (and a nice lunch, thanks dSpace!) we drove back to the appartement just to go up very early again on Wednesday to visit the meeting we wanted to visit….

Anyway… shit happens. This way Clemens and I had time to discuss the Willert AUTOSAR solutions. Basically there are 2 AUTOSAR solutions, Classic and Adaptive.

Classic is for targeted at smaller controllers and very static environments. Base is that many system information and software (SW-C, Software Component) information is captured in an XML structure (ARXML) Tools can read that structure and use the information in there to configure themselves and to export their own added information to other tools.

Adaptive is targeted at larger systems that have dynamic components. Base is a Linux environment with many specs for security. It will (amongst others) be used by ADAS (Advanced Driver Assistent Systems)

What does that has to do with us? Well, Rhapsody is a tool as well and it is, out of the box, capable of reading and writing these ARXML files. You can then add information and work with the provided information. We think, however, that this solution is not applicable and scalable enough for a lot of customers. So we visit the meetings and have access to the AUTOSAR information to be able to create our own simplified AUTOSAR profile. (Apple Style, or better: Jobs Style, keep it as simple as possible, hide the complex stuff, make it usable for everybody but also make the complex stuff still accessible for Guru’s)

What we basically do with Classic is that we import ARXML and convert it to UML Elements right away. In that way we can use “normal” UML to develop AUTOSAR SWC’s.

Adaptive is very new and in early stages of definition. So there is a lot to do for us in that area, not only in profiles and frameworks but we can do a lot there in Rhapsody modeling, at least that is what we think.

So in the next weeks we have a lot to do. Clemens and I will be cooperating in creating / improving the Willert AUTOSAR Solution!

Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)