Software im Automobil 2006

I participated the annual "Software im Automobil" conference in wonderful Stuttgart last week. Naturally, the issue of autosar had a lot of emphasis in many of the talks. The automotive industry is fighting with complexity issues: Not only is the software getting more and more complex in functionality, it also has to be implemented in an environment that is influenced by many environmental and political issues, that is distributed, needs to be able to be updated, is hardware-expensive, has to run on hardware from different suppliers AND is often developed by different suppliers. The standard, low-level architecture and runtime that autosar envisions will no doubt be a big step toward more control over the spiralling costs involved with software and hardware development in this sector.

Next to autosar, I was surprised to see domain-specific modeling as the next-hottest topic during the conference. A growing number of players in this area start to understand that they cannot build the software or software product lines the build with standard, off-the-shelf development tools and languages like UML or C. UML lacks the preciseness they need and C or similar languages simply are the wrong tool: No one really wants to write 10 million lines of code manually and maintain them on that level. A raise in abstraction, where possible, is a logical next step and this is what DSM provides. In doing so, DSM will provide a proven solution to exactly those issues the automotive sector is struggling with.