Abstract

Several decades ago, computer control systems known as Electric Control Units (ECUs) were introduced to the automotive industry. Mechanical hardware units have since then increasingly been replaced by computer controlled systems to manage complex tasks such as airbag, ABS, cruise control and so forth. This has lead to a massive increase of software functions and data which all needs to be managed. There are several tools and techniques for this, however, current tools and techniques for developing real-time embedded system are mostly focusing on software functions, not data. Those tools do not fully support developers to manage run-time data at design time. Furthermore, current tools do not focus on visualization of relationship among data items in the system. This thesis is a part of previous work named the Data Entity approach which prioritizes data management at the top level of development life cycle. Our main contribution is a tool that introduces a new way to intuitively explore run-time data items, which are produced and consumed by software components, utilized in the entire system. As a consequence, developers will achieve a better understanding of utilization of data items in the software system. This approach enables developers and system architects to avoid redundant data as well as finding and removing stale data from the system. The tool also allows us to analyze conflicts regarding run-time data items that might occur between software components at design time. A Data-Entity Approach for Component-Based Real-Time Embedded Systems Developmen