Sebastian Benz

In this talk, we present our experiences using TMF Xtext for creating our automotive language: ARText, a textual language for the specification of AUTOSAR systems. AUTOSAR is a joint initiative from various automotive companies defining a standard architecture, methodology and middleware for automotive systems. The objective of ARText is to simplify the specifications of AUTOSAR systems by providing a concise textual language for its component based software design model.

The challenges in defining (textual) editors for AUTOSAR models are:

• Huge specifications (up to 500MB in XML)
• Large and complex metamodel (~630 EClasses)
• Different AUTOSAR metamodel versions must be permanently supported (currently three different versions with significant differences)
• Integration into an existing tooling environment for AUTOSAR based on Eclipse:
  • Interaction with existing editors for AUTOSAR models
  • Integration into complex workspace management with different resource types and transformation steps

To address these challenges, we extended the generated Xtext editors with the following features:

• On the fly model transformation during editing
• Support for different metamodel versions
• Extension mechanism for enriching ARText with custom commands

Sebastian Benz is a software engineer at BMW Car IT. He has multiple years of experience in model-based software development with a special interest in model-based test case generation. He initiated and participated in the development of COPE. Currently, he is leader of the ARText sub-project of Artop, an Eclipse-based platform for AUTOSAR tools.

Slides