Visualization of Electrical Architectures In the Automotive Domain Based on the Needs of Stakeholders

Abstract: The use of software in automotive engineering keeps on growing higher every year. This has an impact on a data stored in a database in such a way that a structure of data stored becomes complex due to hierarchy and hence difficult to understand. The benefit of visualizing a complex data structure of a system facilitates a quick learning of how a system work and a general understanding of where to locate a particular piece of data in a database. A large focus in the industries is placed more on innovating new features of a car by improving current software built in a car’s system and also developing new software. There is rather less focus in visualizing the software which have already been implemented in a car’s system since the visualization does not provide direct value. The purpose of this study is to provide an automated visualization of a current implementation of software data that is stored in a database and to understand the needs of different stakeholders who work with the database. The visualization is meant to cover the needs, which are functional and non-functional requirements, of different stakeholders interacting with a database to aid the understanding of a system and to facilitate decision making in their work. Our focus of the study has been to understand the field of automotive software engineering, its architecture, understanding how to get the needs of stakeholders, implementing an automated software visualization and finally gather more stakeholders’ needs regarding the visualization of data. The visualization was done on a small sub-system of the car showing how the logical components were connected to one another via input and output signals, this covers a view in an automotive architecture called a logical view. On the later stage of the thesis, we interviewed other stakeholders to gather more needs towards automated visualization. One of their needs we gathered was that the stakeholders wanted to have another view which is named a physical view in the automotive industry. In additional to that, the stakeholders proposed to have an interactive way when visualizing the data, meaning that the visualization should provide the ability to view less or more details, to be able to filter the contents, to sort the contents and also to have the output that can easily be understood without cracking your brain.