Meta Modelling in the Vehicle Industry

Abstract: The advance of electronics and information technology during the last years has made possible the proliferation of embedded systems in all fields. Accordingly, embedded systems have become increasingly available in all automotive products. These systems bring about improvements in functionality, increase of system complexity, and more interaction between hardware and software components. The development of these systems requires that engineers from multi-disciplinary fields cooperate closely in order to efficiently develop such complex products. However, there is often disagreements among these engineers about design concepts such as requirements, functions, and specifications. Despite that there have been various attempts of providing information models for automotive embedded system design, there is in practice a lack of a consistent structure that represents and describes the relationships between these concepts. Moreover, such structure has never been implemented in an industrial modeling language for complex physical systems such as Modelica. The objectives of this thesis are to provide a multi-level structure, which represents different design abstraction levels, and a meta-model for automotive embedded system design. This thesis was done at Scania, Södertälje, where these models were used for designing a fuel level display embedded system for a truck. The multi-level structure was designed and developed using a real case, fuel display system, from high-level abstraction (customer requirements) down to component/ block level specifications. Afterwards, a meta-model was proposed. The proposed meta-model was evaluated based on nine interviews with experts in information modeling and development area from both industry and academia. The following criteria were considered for the evaluation of meta-model: correctness, comprehensibility, expressiveness, generality, and usefulness. Six experts confirmed that the proposed meta-model was correct while two experts commented that in general, models could not be said to be correct or incorrect. One of the experts considered that the model required more details. In addition, the model was comprehensible for the majority of the experts. Discussions regarding semantics and expressiveness resulted in some model refinements. Afterwards, the experts acknowledged the expressiveness of this meta-model. The experts agreed that this meta-model was general for automotive system design, and six of them confirmed that the it was useful. The rest recommended that