SAE’s New AADL Standard: Thoughts on Its Impact
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| Frank Bokulich is an aerospace standards engineer with SAE Aerospace.
Q: What impact do you think this new AADL standard might have for the auto industry?
There’s a great potential for impacting the automotive industry. On a lot of occasions, we don’t really see a crossover between the aerospace and the automotive communities, but in areas of computer architecture and software, there are a opportunities for things to cross over. This is one of those instances.
Q: How did this project get off the ground?
This effort originally started out as something to aid avionics systems software developers, and as the committee went out and reached for more and more expertise and feedback into the development of this standard, we started gaining interest from other sectors—the consumer electronics areas, the automotive community; even people in the European community have expressed a great interest in this activity. What it comes down to is that they’re facing a lot of the same types of challenges with regard to reliability, safety, and things such as fault isolation, finding where problems are occurring within software. This particular standard provides some assistance to developers in these areas not only to design these components and architectures for performance-critical, real-time embedded systems but also to be able to go back and measure the reliability and the responsiveness and the safety and security of the product itself.
Q: Why was this standard necessary?
It essentially puts everybody on the same page, so it enables a much greater supplier base to be created, because the end users, not only the people who are driving the automobiles, but the people who are servicing them, the people developing them, the automotive manufacturers who work with their particular suppliers, are all on the same page with respect to the embedded software systems, and everybody knows exactly what requirements they’re looking for, what types of interfaces they’re using, how the various systems are communicating with each other and working together. In these particular areas, standards are very useful and the SAE AADL filled a void. What you usually see is an increased supplier base because the market’s more accessible when a lot more people know what the requirements are up front. They know that whatever product they’re developing, if they develop it to this particular standard, and say for example, Ford and GM are calling out the standard, they know that their products are going to interface with Ford and GM systems.
Q: So everything within the vehicle will be more integrated?
Correct, the SAE AADL allows embedded software systems to be more integrated. A larger framework of standards is being developed by the AUTOSAR initiative in Europe in order to facilitate better integration of physical components as well. The other opportunity is that you’ll have companies that supply electronics and electrical components and even some software packages to the automotive industry and the aerospace industry as well as some other industries using the same standard. It increases the supplier base and the potential for integration even beyond those industries.
Q: How straightforward will it be for engineers to begin using this standard?
It should be pretty straightforward. One of the goals of the standards committee is to make this user-friendly and to make it useful to multiple industries, not just one particular industry. For that reason the AADL was defined to have both a textual and a graphical representation. In addition, a UML profile of the AADL has been defined such that organizations that already use UML as a design notation can leverage AADL. Furthermore, an XML interchange format has been defined for AADL that allows organizations to interface existing engineering and analysis tools. Finally, the AADL has been made extensible, so they’re going to be reaching out and developing these annexes to make this standard more useful to different potential users. One such standard extension to support fault and reliability has already been published as part of the SAE AADL standard suite (AS5506/1). They’re potentially looking at some annexes that will take even more specific automotive applications and help tailor the standard and make it more user-friendly to the automotive community. They’re also going to be looking at other annexes, offshoots of the standard, that are going to enable people to use the standard the way that’s going to be most useful for them or for their particular industry.
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