Present and future requirements in developing industrial embedded real-time systems - interviews with designers in the vehicle domain

Abstract

In this paper, we aim at capturing the industrial viewpoint of today's and future requirements in development of embedded real-time systems. We do this by interviewing ten senior designers at four Swedish companies, developing embedded applications in the vehicle domain. This study shows that reliability and safety are the main properties in focus during development. It also shows that the amount of functionality has been increasing in the examined systems. Still the present requirements are fulfilled using considerably homogenous development methods. The study also shows that, in the future, there will be even stronger requirements on dependability and control performance at the same time as requirements on more softer and resource demanding functionality will continue to increase. Consequently, the complexity will increase, and with diverging requirements, more heterogeneous development methods are called for to fulfil all application specific requirements