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EATOP

EATOP

The EATOP project is a proposed open source project under the Modeling Project.

This proposal is in the Project Proposal Phase (as defined in the Eclipse Development Process) and is written to declare its intent and scope. We solicit additional participation and input from the Eclipse community. Please send all feedback to the Eclipse Proposals Forum.

Background

Modern vehicles are extremely complex embedded systems that integrate software and hardware from a large set of contributors. In order to cope with this complexity during development, it is getting more and more common to use suitable abstractions, i.e., models that allow for an early validation of important properties. In particular, hardware models are used for analysis. Functional models, like Matlab/ Simulink or ASCET, are used in software development, in order to allow for an early validation of software. On Electric/ Electronic (E/E) architecture level, domain specific architecture description languages like EAST-ADL, SysML or the AUTOSAR standard enable properties of the system architecture to be modeled which facilitates system wide analysis, design space exploration, reuse of development artifacts and change management.

EAST-ADL

EAST-ADL is a domain specific language to model functional-, system-, software-, and hardware-architecture in the automotive domain. EAST-ADL has been created by the ITEA (www.itea2.org) funded project EAST/EEA. Further development has been done in two funded projects ATESST and ATESST2. Since 2010 a European funded project MAENAD (www.maenad.eu) maintains and extends the language with respect to electrified vehicles and safety development lifecycle modeling. For long-term maintenance and dissemination, the EAST-ADL association (www.east-adl.info) has been founded. It maintains the meta-model definition and makes the latest version available to the public.

As of today, the EAST-ADL has been implemented and used through the following tools:

  • Eclipse MDT project Papyrus provides an UML2 profile for EAST-ADL
  • The Eclipse Industry Working Group PolarSys - a successor of the TOPCASED initiative and the OPEES project - provides an EAST-ADL editor
  • The commercial tool MetaEdit+ from MetaCase provides a meta-model implementation of EAST-ADL and generic editors authoring EAST-ADL model instances
  • The commercial tool System Weaver from Systemite provides editors for the EAST-ADL modeling
  • Further tools exist from Arcticus, Symtavision, Rapita, RealTime@Work, and Chronos

Relationship to AUTOSAR

AUTOSAR (www.autosar.org) is a software architecture and configuration standard in the automotive industry. It focuses on the software architecture for electronic control units (ECU) in road vehicles, their deployment to networked ECU systems in vehicles, and the configuration of the basic software in such ECUs. The AUTOSAR Tool Platform User Group (Artop) develops and maintains a platform with common base functionality for creating modeling tools supporting the AUTOSAR standard.Artop essentially encompasses implementations of the different releases of the AUTOSAR meta-model plus a rich set of services and components for managing and processing AUTOSAR models.

The EAST-ADL meta-model has a close relationship to the AUTOSAR meta-model as both address the model-based development part in a process. EAST-ADL covers the function- and system-architecture and AUTOSAR acts with the system configuration and software architecture.

Scope

EATOP is an Eclipse-based implementation of the EAST-ADL standard, which is a domain specific architecture description language (ADL) established in the automotive industry.

EATOP will be focused on providing the following main features:

  • Implementation of important versions and revisions of the EAST-ADL meta-model in EMF
  • Serialization/deserialization of EAST-ADL models/files conforming to the EAST-ADL XSD schema
  • A tool platform and an exemplary basic IDE experience for creating, managing, editing, validating, transforming or otherwise processing EAST-ADL models in the Eclipse workspace.

EATOP is intended to support the work of the EAST-ADL association by providing an Eclipse-based tool platform implementation for the EAST-ADL standard. Up to now, there have been multiple initiatives to create Eclipse-based implementations of EAST-ADL which led to a quite cluttered and redundant tool landscape. The goal of EATOP is to reconcile these initiatives, consolidate the different implementations and shape like a reference implementation of EAST-ADL under the umbrella of this new Eclipse project.

Due to the complementary nature and close relation between EAST-ADL and AUTOSAR, EATOP will be closely aligned with Artop. Most important, EATOP will be based on the Sphinx modeling tool platform to enable a maximum of interoperability between EAST-ADL and AUTOSAR tools as well as the creation of integrated tool chains that cover both standards and support a seamless transition between them.

Description

EATOP is an infrastructure platform implementation of common base functionality for design tools that enable an effective usage of the architecture description language EAST-ADL in software and systems development. It includes the following capabilities:

  • EMF based access to the EAST-ADL meta-model
    • Tools to generate an XML schema and an Ecore meta-model from the Enterprise Architect sources of the EAST-ADL releases published by the EAST-ADL association.
    • EMF-based meta-model implementations of several EAST-ADL releases that provide EAST-ADL design tool developers with Java APIs for manipulating EAST-ADL model instances. EATOP contains for each supported EAST-ADL release the required meta-model implementation. The first supported EAST-ADL releases is the version 2.1.10.
  • File based as well as database persistency management
    • EATOP provides in combination with Sphinx the functionality to serialize and deserialize the instances of the EAST-ADL meta-model within an EAXML file. The EAXML file is kind of a xml file which contains the serialized form of the EAST-ADL meta-model instances. Its content is conform to the xml schema of the corresponding EAST-ADL release.
    • Database persistence of EAST-ADL models.
    • Management of EAST-ADL models spread over one or multiple XML files in the Eclipse workspace.
  • Basic Eclipse user interface support
    • A wizard for creation of an EAST-ADL project
    • A wizard for creation of an EAST-ADL file (.eaxml)
    • An EAST-ADL release preference page
    • A property page for EAST-ADL projects
    • An EATOP perspective
    • An EATOP explorer view which shows only EAST-ADL content and the instances of the EAST-ADL objects in an EAST-ADL file
    • A property tab which shows the properties of EAST-ADL object instances and allows to modify them
    • Undo/Redo functionality
    • Drag and drop functionality between EAST-ADL content
  • To enable a seamless workflow in a development process, interoperability and interfacing with other tools and platforms will be provided
    • Bridges between EATOP and Papyrus and synchronization of EMF-based EAST-ADL APIs with UML2 profile based EAST-ADL implementations created with Papyrus.
    • Interface to requirements engineering tools (via ReqIF, see Eclipse/RMF),
    • Interface to software modeling tools (e.g., via AUTOSAR)
    • Interface to other model-based design tools (e.g. Matlab/Simulink)
    • Interoperability with domain independent abstractions of EAST-ADL like the CESAR reference technology platform (www.cesarproject.eu), the MBAT reference technology platform (www.mbat-artemis.eu), or PolarSys solution.
  • Further miscellaneous features will ease the handling of EAST-ADL. Examples are
    • Model to model transformation between the different abstraction layers within the EAST-ADL meta-model.
    • Variability management supporting both the definition of variant-rich EAST-ADL models as well as creation of fully/partly configured occurrences of these models representing individual variants or variant subsets.
  • Demonstrators
    • A standalone application that can be used to conveniently explore EATOP without an existing Eclipse installation. It demonstrates the features and capabilities of EATOP.
    • Experimental graphical editor to create and visualize EAST-ADL based models.

Why Eclipse?

EATOP has been created in publicly funded European R&D projects. It consolidates the so far different implementations of the EAST-ADL meta-model. Eclipse is more and more accepted as standard tool platform in the automotive industry - the efforts made in the Eclipse Automotive Industry Working Group are a good indicator for that. For these reasons, Eclipse is a widely accepted place for a project like EATOP and an ideal basis to guarantee its long term availability and development.

Technically EATOP has many relations to Sphinx and to Artop. Like Artop, EATOP is based on Sphinx. As the EAST-ADL meta-model has many conceptual links to the AUTOSAR meta-model, EATOP naturally has close relationships to Artop. Artop is an industry group driven implementation of the AUTOSAR meta-model based on Eclipse. Therefore, it is an obvious choice to base EATOP on Eclipse as well.

Relationship with other Eclipse Projects

The EATOP project will be based on and use Eclipse Platform, EMF, EMF Transaction, and Sphinx to provide the core functionality. In addition, EMF Validation, GMF and/or Graphiti will be used to support validation and graphical editing of EAST-ADL models.

Initial Contribution

The initial contribution consists of sources, tests, build, and documentation and is available in the EclipseLabs space of the Eclipse Automotive Industry Working Group. It has been created within two publicly funded European R&D projects:

  • MAENAD: Since 2010 the European funded project MAENAD (www.maenad.eu) maintains and extends the EAST/ADL language. The project encloses tool development. EATOP consolidates the already existing exchange formats by the definition of a common XML schema.
  • SAFE: Since 2011 the ITEA2 project SAFE (www.safe-project.eu) works on a safety related meta-model. As this meta-model mainly extends EAST-ADL, the efforts spent on EATOP also helps to create the SAFE tool platform. The SAFE project is organized in the framework of the ITEA2, EUREKA cluster program. The work has been funded by the German Ministry for Education and Research (BMBF), and by the French Ministry of the Economy and Finance (DGCIS).

Legal Issues

There are no known legal issues.

Committers

The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:

The following persons are proposed as co-leads of the project:

Yue Ma, Itemis France (Eclipse expert, release engineering, contribution/release process)
Stefan Voget, Continental Automotive (Domain expert, community building)

The following individuals are proposed as initial committers to the project:

Stephan Eberle, Itemis France
Judit Simon-Karlsson, Arccore
Daniels Umanovskis, Arccore

We welcome additional committers and contributions.

Mentors

The following Architecture Council members will mentor this project:

Ed Merks, Itemis
Eike Stepper, ESC

Interested Parties

The following individuals, organisations, companies and projects have expressed interest in this project:

Johan Ekberg, Arccore
Gerhard Griessnig, AVL
Helko Glathe, Carmeq
Paul Hoser, BMW Car IT
Matthias Tichy Chalmers, University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Lars Parteto, Chalmers University of Technology and University of Gothenburg, Sweden
Stefan Kuntz, Continental Automotive GmbH
Philipp Cuenot, Continental Automotive France SAS
Ignacio Garro, Continental Teves
Ralph Müller, Eclipse Foundation
Simon Burton, ETAS GmbH
Maged Khalil, FORTISS GmbH
Martin Hillenbrand, FZI Forschungszentrum Informatik
David Servat, Institut Carnot CEA LIST DILS/LISE
Sara Tucci, Institut Carnot CEA LIST DILS/LISE
Chokri Mraidha, Institut Carnot CEA LIST DILS/LISE
John Favaro, Intecs Informatica e Tecnologia del Software S.p.A.
Lei Pi, Intecs Informatica e Tecnologia del Software S.p.A.
Andreas Graf, Itemis Germany
Matthias Biehl, KTH
Istvan Horvath, Mentor
Janne Luoma, Metacase
Juha-Pekka Tolvanen, Metacase
Ali Akar, MODELI::SOFT
Thomas Peikenkamp, OFFIS e.V.
Ramin Tavakoli Kolagari, Ohm University of Applied Science Nürnberg
Friedhelm Stappert, Ohm University of Applied Science Nürnberg
Christoph Hammel, Robert Bosch GmbH
Nigisti Ayele, Systemite
Mark Oliver Reiser, TU Berlin
Alexander Metzner, University of Applied Sciences Regensburg
Jürgen Mottok, University of Applied Sciences Regensburg
Bernhard Bauer, University of Augsburg
Benjamin Honke, University of Augsburg
Hans Blom, Volvo Group Trucks Technology
Henrik Lönn, Volvo Group Trucks Technology

Project Scheduling

May 2013: Proposal published and announced to Eclipse membership
September 2013: Creation review
October 2013: Submission of initial contribution and IP review
November 2013: Check-in and initial contribution to Eclipse Git repository; setup of builds; update sites / downloads; Bugzilla; Wiki; Website
Tbd.: First EATOP release
Tbd.: Integration of EATOP in simultaneous release train

Changes to this Document

Date Change
24-May-2013 Document created

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