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Client

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SiemensEDA, a segment of Siemens Digital Industries Software, offers a wide range of software solutions for the design, simulation, and testing of electronic systems. Its products are used by companies in a variety of industries, including automotive, aerospace, and telecommunications.

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Challenge

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AUTOSAR is a development partnership of automotive interested parties, pursuing the objective to create and establish an open and standardized software architecture for automotive electronic control units (ECUs). Siemens EDA has multiple products to support the development of AUTOSAR models, Capital™ VSTAR software being one of their flagship tools – Siemens’ implementation of the AUTOSAR standard, a complete offering with tools and software platform to meet all ECU platform needs. Polarion™ REQUIREMENTS software is a requirement modeling product that allows engineers to build their requirements from scratch. Siemens EDA and Polarion exist under the umbrella of the same parent company, so integration of their tools was a logical step to make these products even more alluring to customers. In this project, we were tasked with integrating data from the Polarion tool into Capital VSTAR for traceability purposes.

IncQuery Group was also entrusted with the task of helping Siemens EDA automate updating open-source components Artop and Sphinx used by the tools developed by the company – the former being an infrastructure platform implementation of common base functionality for development tools that are used for designing and configuring AUTOSAR compliant systems and ECUs, the latter being a project under the Eclipse Automotive project to provide an extensible platform that simplifies the creation of integrated modeling tool environments supporting individual or multiple modeling languages.

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Solution

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In the case of Polarion, we integrated the tool into Capital VSTAR, providing a linking mechanism between AUTOSAR elements and Polarion™ REQUIREMENTS. Using the provided Polarion API, we developed features that grant engineers access to a Polarion server and get a list of requirements from it. Using the capabilities of Capital VSTAR, we also developed features to allow engineers to select AUTOSAR elements and Polarion requirements and link them to each other. The final step was to develop a consistency checking logic to analyze whether there are any broken links in the AUTOSAR model (e.g., the link having been removed from the requirement in Polarion but the AUTOSAR element still having a reference to the requirement).

Regarding the open-source components Artop and Sphinx, our goal was to support Siemens EDA’s contribution to these projects. Thanks to the expertise, IncQuery Group has accumulated about open-source components and our deep understanding of the market, we know what parts of code need to be protected as a company’s intellectual property and what parts are better to be released for public access, thus helping the community at large profit from their contributions. Furthermore, IncQuery Group helped Siemens EDA create the internal infrastructure to build and test upon release of said components, making the process of changing versions of them under Siemens EDA’s software simpler and more efficient.  

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Results

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One of the main payoffs of the successful collaboration between Siemens EDA and IncQuery Group is having allowed traceability between Polarion and Capital VSTAR – both formidable tools with extensive user bases –, thus enabling the usage of modern model-based systems engineering practices via the capability to follow individual implementation-level changes all the way up to the originating requirement, with the addition of the ability to perform completeness checks based on the existence of these trace links. The comprehensive toolchain can now be marketed as a bundle deal, making the product more attractive to customers in the domains of the automotive industry, engineering tools, and custom development.

Siemens EDA can enhance its efficiency and productivity by leveraging automation to streamline the management of open-source projects such as Artop and Sphinx, resulting in significant time savings.