Refactoring an Automotive Embedded Software Stack using the Component-Based Paradigm

The number of electronic systems in cars is continuously growing. Electronic systems, consisting of so-called electronic control units (ECUs) interconnected by a communication network, account for up to 30% of a modern car's worth. Consequently, software plays an ever more important role, both for the implementation of functions and the infrastructure. In order to benefit from the reuse of software modules, the major automotive companies have standardized a large number of these modules in the context of the AUTOSAR consortium. In this paper we propose the refactoring of the AUTOSAR stack of system software modules by applying the component-based paradigm in order to increase the scalability of the software stack according to the particular requirements of the application. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach by performing the refactoring of the modules FlexRay Driver and FlexRay Interface as an example and by deploying the resulting refactored components in a sample automotive application. Finally, we measure the execution time as well as the memory consumption of the refactored components and compare these measures to the measures obtained from the corresponding ordinary AUTOSAR modules.