AUTOSAR - Overview

Prerequisites: Electronic Control Unit

AutOSAr is an acronym for Automotive Open System Architecture. As its name suggests it is a software architecture for automotive ECUs. 

Before understanding AUTOSAR, you need to know what is meant by a software architecture.

Software architecture is a blueprint or the software model designed based on its hardware which guides software developer to make the software as modular as possible  and get optimum utilization of available hardware resources too. 

AUTOSAR is the software architecture designed specially for Automotive ECU hardware. If you have read the ECU article given in the pre-requisites, then you already know that automobiles have Electronic control systems in them called ECUs. These ECUs are embedded systems. And an embedded system without software is like a body without mind. Software tells the hardware, what actions to be taken on its input and how the outputs  must be computed and given. All the algorithms for vehicle control are  realized by software in ECUs. But the automotive system controlled by an ECU is huge and complex. So we need a software architecture as a guide for writing the software. This software architecture sets some rules and guidelines following which, will make the process of software development easy and simple. 

But there are so many companies in market who write software for ECUs and manufacture ECUs too ( like Bosch, Delphi, Continental etc). And each company has their own separate software architecture. So the OEMs ( Original Equipment Manufacturers : say Car Manufacturers)  had to take the complete software for an ECU from a single company. For example, Engine ECU controls exhaust system and ignition system both. Now if Bosch has very good software for exhaust control but continental has better software for ignition control, The car manufacturer could not take both software modules from both company and merge them in a single ECU. The reason being both companies follow different software architectures and hence their softwares are not compatible. 

But wouldn't it be wonderful if both the companies followed same software architecture so that the software modules from both  could be integrated together in a single ECU and the car has best of both ignition and Exhaust systems.

So a major stakeholders of Automotive Industry (Manufacturers and Suppliers) joined together and designed a common software architecture which will be used as a standard by all the automotive companies and followed by them in software development process. They called this standard software architecture as AUTOSAR. The textbook definition of AUTOSAR is as given below:

AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) is a partnership of automotive manufacturers and suppliers working together to develop and establish a de-facto open industry standard for automotive E/E architectures.

The slogan of AUTOSAR is "Cooperate on standards, Compete on Implementation". This calls for all the automotive companies to use a standard AUTOSAR architecture and competition can be shown in areas like better LLD (Low level design, Better algorithms to achieve functionalities, implementing new features etc.

This software architecture AUTOSAR also keeps updating its rules and guidelines and hence various versions of AUTOSAR are present. Initially we had AUTOSAR 1.0 then came AUTOSAR v2.0, then V3.0 and V4.0. Currently as of today (end of 2017) The latest AUTOSAR is version 4.3. In each version, minor improvements and features are added to previous versions and released.

AUTOSAR Members:

The nine companies which founded AUTOSAR are Core Members of AUTOSAR community. They are as shown in the below:

AUTOSAR CORE MEMBERS

Then there are Premium Partners who make use of AUTOSAR architecture and also collaborate with core partners and development partners  in order to define AUTOSAR specifications.

Click here to see the list of premium partners of AUTOSAR.

Then there are Development Partners who also make use of AUTOSAR architecture and also collaborate with core partners and premium partners  in order to define AUTOSAR specifications.

Click here to see the list of development partners of AUTOSAR.

There are also Associate Partners who are authorized to make use of AUTOSAR documents which are already released.

Click here to see the list of associate partners of AUTOSAR.

Finally there are Attendees who witness the process of  defining the autosar specifications and help in defining the specifications with core, premium and development partners.

Click here to see the list of attendees of AUTOSAR consortium.

If you want to join AUTOSAR then click here.

This is the first article in our AUTOSAR series where I have given an introduction of AUTOSAR to you. We will delve deep into benefits of AUTOSAR, technicalities of AUTOSAR software architechture and then further deep into the specifications of each module in our coming articles. If you want to see the AUTOSAR specifications and know more about it then you can go to official website of AUTOSAR (Link: https://www.autosar.org/).

Author -  Shyam Bhat