Identifying optimal sets of standardized architectural features — A method and its automotive application

Industrial standards are used to formalize procedures, rules and guidelines for the industry to follow. Following a standard requires continuous adoption of the new standardized features where only their subset is required by individual companies. Therefore the prioritization of the features and the assessment of their impact on the development projects is crucial for the success of the project. In software engineering, industrial standards are used increasingly often to standardize a language for designing architectural components of the system by defining domain-specific meta-models. The purpose is to assure the interoperability between a number of software tools exchanging the architectural models. In this paper, we present a method for identifying optimal sets of new standardized architectural features to be adopted in the development projects. The optimization is done based on the assessment of their benefit for the projects and the estimated cost of re-work in the modeling tools according to the changes in the standardized meta-model. We evaluate the method by applying it on 14 new architectural features of a new release of the AUTOSAR standard which is followed in the development of the automotive software systems.