July 2006 Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland Article

Quoted in a piece on Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates, Technology Ireland, Issue 3 Vol 37.

Automotive software (Automobile Sector) is an expanding area of software engineering and embedded systems research and development. Within the next five years, premium cars are expected to host a cumulated amount of up to one gigabyte of binary code of software deployed via a set of interconnected embedded platforms. Software developers  already working in other domains like industrial automation systems and embedded telecommunications systems can readily transfer their skills to the automotive software sector .  The Irish government via the Science Foundation Ireland has funded the Irish Software Engineering Research Centre Lero with a focus on automotive software engineering (our focus in UCD is on Software Product Lines, Visualisation and Autonomic Software Systems). To design, implement and manage the complexity of such a huge, heterogeneous distributed system with increasingly short innovation cycles and a vast installed base, neither the techniques and methods of classical embedded systems are suitable, nor the known ones in the desktop and business software domain. “Automotive Software Engineering is a good example of how the Irish full end-to-end knowledge economy can be marshalled, in short order, for a high growth and high value area…The standard will be built around globally distributed software development using next generation visualisation tools in the development of autonomic automotie systems”.  To tackle this challenge, we need newly adapted software engineering methods for the automotive domain that allow to specifically design the different software types, corresponding to their requirements, and to later on integrate the system parts into one reliable and manageable system. A specific example of this is the move from proprietary software architectures to industry wide standards. Current automotive systems consist of different electronic control units, a controller area network, sensors and actuators. Current industry wide efforts include a group developing the open standard AUTOSAR, which aims to have a common automotive architecture for developing vehicular software, user interfaces and management.


References

  1. http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/pretscha/events/seas05/
  2. Automotive Software – opportunities for Irish graduates,  Technology Ireland, Issue 3, Vol 37, July/August 2006 

Lero – The Irish Software Engineering Research Centre.

Books

Conferences: 

Past Events:

http://www.vmars.tuwien.ac.at/summerschool/ http://www.inf.ethz.ch/personal/pretscha/events/seas05/

Lero Partners Ireland and Europe:

Aimware
Analog Devices (I)
Ashling Microsystems
Beaumont Hospital
Robert Bosch GmbH 
IBM Ireland 
Iona Technologies plc
Intel Ireland Ltd 
Kugler Maag cie
Motorola Ireland
Piercom
QAD Ireland Ltd
Silicon & Software Systems
eVolve Systems

Others:

Society of Automotive EngineersYazaki CorporationJohnson Controls
DENSO
ZF Friedrichshafen AG
DaimlerChrysler. Research and Technology
FORD Research
AbsInt

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