View-Centric Modeling of Automotive Logical Architectures

TL;DR

This paper presents a SysML-based approach for modeling automotive logical architectures as function nets, enhancing comprehensibility and supporting early system design insights.

Contribution

It introduces a succinct function net modeling method with views for automotive architectures, aiding developers in understanding complex systems early in development.

Findings

Facilitates early insight into automotive system properties

Supports modeling of variants, modes, and scenarios

Improves comprehensibility of complex architectures

Abstract

Modeling the logical architecture is an often underestimated development step to gain an early insight into the fundamental functional properties of an automotive system. An architectural description supports developers in making design decisions for further development steps like the refinement towards a software architecture or the partition of logical functions on ECUs and buses. However, due to the large size and complexity of the system and hence the logical architecture, a good notation, method, and tooling is necessary. In this paper, we show how the logical architectures can be modeled succinctly as function nets using a SysML-based notation. The usefulness for developers is increased by comprehensible views on the complete model to describe automotive features in a self contained way including their variants, modes, and related scenarios.