Today’s cars are produced in line with the modular design principle which enables efficient production of individual customer-configured vehicles. The EBASO project (development and assessment of variant-rich embedded software) seeks to extend this approach to the development of embedded software in the automotive domain. Such software controls the car’s air-conditioning system, navigation system and electric windows and is distributed across up to 80 control devices networked with one another whose perfect functioning must be assured at all times. Yet the trend in the automobile industry is towards ever more customized cars with matching customized software architectures.

To enable the industry to respond flexibly to the range of individual customer requirements, the EBASO project integrates easy variation management concepts in MATLAB/Simulink modeling software. Similar to a module, the software offers a variety of model building blocks for the specification of a car’s functions. EBASO also integrates further building blocks which allow developers to model variance per drag and drop and to easily configure product variations. For instance, if the car is to be given electric windows, they can be represented and controlled in a MATLAB/Simulink model. This is a simple and swift way of compiling a configured software architecture description for the car. In the EBASO project, SQC collaborates with PROSTEP GmbH on developing a demonstrator to show the practicality and feasibility of the approach. The demonstrator uses the MATLAB/Simulink extensions developed in the project to present simple modeling of product variations in automobile engineering.

The project is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) within its “KMU-innovativ” program for innovation in the SME sector.