Industry-track: System-Level Logical Execution Time for Automotive Software Development

The way how automotive software is developed has rapidly evolved with the introduction of heterogeneous hardware/software architectures. Nevertheless, the requirement for deterministic behavior of safety-critical cause-effect chains persists unchanged. As a side effect of the shared platform, complex dependencies between critical and non-critical functions arise, demanding a model-based approach to handle time determinism throughout the design process. Limited to the scope of a single component, the Logical Execution Time (LET) paradigm provides such an abstraction of the runtime behavior. It has been successfully introduced in AUTOSAR to mitigate the design complexity, ensure a deterministic timing behavior and facilitate a lock-free communication. This paper discusses how the scope of LET can be extended to the system level, enabling an efficient design of distributed AUTOSAR software, where robustness towards platform changes plays a key role. System-Level Logical Execution Time (SL-LET) is currently in the process of AUTOSAR standardization, supported by a joint group of industry and academic partners.