ECMFA 2016

Keynotes

• A Model-Based Driver's License for Self-Driving Cars: Challenges and Future Directions

  Prof. Krzysztof Czarnecki

  Vehicles with limited self-driving capabilities are already on the market and some car makers have promised products capable of autonomous driving in an urban setting in 2020. Self-driving cars will eventually completely transform the automotive industry, replacing private car ownership by service-based products such as robotic cabs. The deployment of large-scale self-driving vehicle fleets will reduce the number of crashes and crash severity, reduce emissions, allow commuters to use their time more effectively, and free up spaces occupied by parked cars. The engineering of self-driving cars requires sophisticated models of the environment and the electronic driver system in order to develop the necessary perception and motion planning and control functions. While current self-driving technologies have improved immensely in recent years, a major challenge is assuring the safe operation of an autonomous vehicle in all traffic situations and all road conditions. I will present a reference architecture for self-driving cars and use it to describe the types of models used in engineering of such systems. I will then focus on the challenges of assuring model-based engineering of self-driving cars. I will close by outlining promising directions to address these challenges.

  Krzysztof Czarnecki is a Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Before coming to Waterloo, he was a researcher at DaimlerChrysler Research (1995-2002), Germany, focusing on improving software development practices and technologies in enterprise, automotive, and aerospace domains. He co-authored the book on 'Generative Programming' (Addison- Wesley, 2000), which deals with automating software component assembly based on domain-specific languages. While at Waterloo, he held the NSERC/Bank of Nova Scotia Industrial Research Chair in Requirements Engineering of Service-oriented Software Systems (2008-2013) and has worked on a range of topics in model-driven systems and software engineering, including product line engineering, design exploration and synthesis, variability modeling, model transformation, and domain-specific languages. He has also helped automotive and aerospace companies introduce effective product-line engineering practices. He received the Premier's Research Excellence Award in 2004 and the British Computing Society in Upper Canada Award for Outstanding Contributions to IT Industry in 2008. He currently leads the NSERC CREATE in Product Line Engineering for Cyber-physical Systems, a $2.7 million industry-oriented graduate research and training program at the University of Waterloo, and WatAuto, Canada's first self-driving vehicle research project.

• Usage of domain specific modeling languages in the automotive industry

  Dr. Stefan Voget, Continental Automotive GmbH.

  Before the introduction of model based engineering, the answer for the language question within the automotive industry was simple: use C. The idea of model based engineering is to shift the complexity out of a textual representation of the code (the source code in C) to a model. Here, the question about language comes up again. This time, it revolves around the decision which language to use to represent the model. Today, the answer is not that simple anymore. Within the automotive industry nearly each project uses it's own representation. Often the representation is determined by the architectural tool used in the project. To become independent from these "tool languages", more and more domain specific modeling languages come up, most of which end up as project specific modeling languages, i.e. specific languages used only in a very dedicated context. In the keynote I will present a motivation for the definition and usage of domain specific modeling languages by using two examples. The first example integrates the development lifecycle of a SW developer with the one of a responsible for functional safety. The second example describes a unified approach for the configuration of different software platforms. Both examples and their motivations are quite different from each other, but show the needs for comprehensive common languages and the importance of model to model transformations to interact between them.

  Mr. Stefan Voget is head of HW/SW Innovations in the central strategy and technology department of Continental Automotive in Regensburg, Germany. Mr. Voget got his doctoral thesis in informatics and mathematics in 1996. From 1997 to 2005 he worked on SW-architecture projects for Robert Bosch GmbH. He changed 2005 to Siemens VDO Automotive in Regensburg. He represented the company as project leader in the AUTOSAR consortium worked for several years as product manager for AUTOSAR products. In 2011 he changed to the innovation department in Continental Automotive and led an international funded project "SAFE" about process interpretation of ISO26262. Since 2014 he works for innovation topics for the automated driving area.