Christian Allmann

Lightweight Process Documentation: Just Enough Structure in Automotive Pre-development

Pre-development in the automotive sector is informally organized to support the engineers trying out new ideas and generally being creative. If feasibility studies reveal system’s uncertainties or bad market opportunities and the development has to be discarded, all documentation attached is obsolete. As a result it is neither possible nor desirable to establish a document centric process in automotive pre-development.

User-Friendly Property Specification and Process Verification – A Case Study with Vehicle-Commissioning Processes

Testing in the automotive industry is supposed to guarantee that vehicles are shipped without any flaw. Respective processes are complex, due to the variety of components and electronic devices in modern vehicles. To achieve error-free processes, their formal analysis is required. Specifying and maintaining properties the processes must satisfy in a user-friendly way is a core requirement on any verification system. We have observed that there are few pattern properties that testing processes adhere to, and we describe these patterns. They depend on the context of the processes, e.g., the components of the vehicle or testing stations. We have developed a framework that instantiates the property patterns at verification time and then verifies the process against these instances. Our empirical evaluation with the industrial partner has shown that our framework does detect property violations in processes. From expert interviews we conclude that our framework is user-friendly and well suited to operate in a real production environment.

Reduction of electronic control units in electric vehicles using multicore technology

In the automotive domain the permanent increase in functionality led to a vast number of electronic control units (ECUs) in todays cars, but packaging and energy consumption became problematic in the last years. Thus it is vital to integrate more functions per ECU and shift in-car-networking complexity into software. To master this challenge, it is inevitable to use multicore ECUs, which provide more computation power with less energy consumption. We show how the automotive domain can benefit from multicore technology and how the software development model has to be addapted to master the newly introduced challenges.

Property specification, process verification, and reporting - A case study with vehicle-commissioning processes

Testing in the automotive industry is supposed to guarantee that vehicles are shipped without any flaw. Respective processes are complex, due to the variety of components and electronic devices in modern vehicles. To achieve error-free processes, their formal analysis is required. Specifying and maintaining properties the processes must satisfy in a user-friendly way is a core requirement on any verification system. We have observed that there are few property templates that testing processes must adhere to, and we describe these templates. They depend on the context of the processes, e.g., the components of the vehicle or testing stations. We have developed a framework that instantiates the templates of properties at verification time and then verifies the process against these instances. To allow an automatic verification we develop a transformation of the commissioning process to a Petri net. Using a novel approach, we are able to report the found violations to the user in a user-friendly way. Our empirical evaluation with the industrial partner has shown that our framework does detect property violations in processes. From expert interviews we conclude that our framework is user-friendly and well suited to operate in a real production environment. HighlightsOur tool verifies if a given process for the commissioning of vehicles complies.Our approach supports the user-friendly specification and reporting of properties.We automatically generate properties through the instantiation of property templates.The developed transformation to Petri nets allows an automatic verification.Our tool is able to detect violations in large processes of the Audi AG.

Research Project E-Performance - In-Car-Network Optimization for Electric Vehicles

In the automotive domain the permanent increase in functionality led to a vast number of electronic control units (ECUs) in today’s cars, but packaging and network bandwidth demands became problematic in the last years. Thus it is vital to integrate more functions per ECU and shift in-car-networking complexity into software. To master this challenge, it is essential to find local and global optimization possibilities, which includes practical software component partitioning strategies while not overlooking the multiplicity of influence factors as well as smart software modules that help to reduce the energy demand wherever possible.