2nd Congress on Real-Time Development - A Review
With the 2nd Congress on Real-Time Development on 28th and 29th June 2010, INCHRON has been able to firmly establish an industry event for professionals in the field of real-time development in embedded systems, which the sector had been missing until now. This was already clear at the Meet-the-Experts event held on the eve of the congress, at which developers, users and decision makers from Audi, EADS, Airbus and BMW enjoyed stimulating discussions with Infineon, MAN, Siemens and the Fraunhofer Institute. Lear Corporation and ESG were able to swap experiences and obtain valuable advice with regard to functional security. The concept of a strong keynote speaker proved itself successful again. The presentation in which Dr. Michael Würtenberger - Vice President ConnectedDrive, Infotainment at BMW - reviewed the "Challenges faced by modern vehicle architectures" was the first highlight of the event. The nouvelle cuisine served as a walking dinner in the lounge atmosphere of the DAILY Munich, further contributed to an exciting build up to the 2nd Congress on Real-Time Development.
This year's congress was again packed with top speakers and also offered opportunities to intensively discuss issues and swap experiences with other participants. New this year was an exhibition, which gave the more than 100 delegates access to the real-time specialists at INCHRON, as well as to the company's partners aquintos, ITK Engineering, PikeTec, GIGATRONIK and IBM, thus providing them with the chance to discuss, as providers of solutions, the real-time behaviour of embedded systems.
Uwe Brodtmann, CEO of INCHRON GmbH, officially opened the event with a focus on the global challenge of managing project risks. Throughout the congress, numerous technical presentations demonstrated that getting to grips early with the subject of timing is imperative and, contrary to the views of representatives of traditional development processes, leads to cost and time savings! The prelude saw Henning Butz, former Senior Manager for Aircraft Information Systems at Airbus, present his keynote "New methods and processes at the heart of the systems in systems innovation strategy". In an interesting lecture, he called for timing and risk management to be integrated into development processes at an early stage to actively tackle real-time challenges. In this context, he made reference to the strategic importance of the INCHRON products chronSIM and chronVAL.
Dr. Klaus Birken from Harman took a detailed look at timing in infotainment systems. Along the way, he coined the term "predictive system design" and encouraged delegates to carry out an assessment of system models at a very early stage. The Domain Specific Language (DSL) introduced by him enables resource modelling to be used for early evaluation of many aspects in a model, such as resource consumption and costs, etc. as well as verification of the model with reality.
Matthias Kessler evaluated two solutions in which Lear Corporation used chronSIM to integrate a new runnable with 2ms into a highly complex system with heterogeneous requirements for BMW. The tight project schedule and the high CPU load were particular challenges.
Using the example of an A8, Bernhard Augustin, the manager responsible for access systems at Audi, demonstrated how the number of control modules and ECUs continually increases in a presentation titled "Integration of previously independent control modules and functions - the challenges of a collaborative project". He then showed how three control modules from various domains could be merged into one. He also gave a very clear demonstration of the requirements relating to the development and integration process for Body Control Modules (BCM) of this kind.
Dr. Réne Graf, Group Leader for System Platforms at Siemens, provided a comprehensive analysis on "The importance of real-time for the automation industry". He first defined real-time as ranging from 100 ms to a few micro-seconds - depending on the required response times, before looking at the urgency of networking and stating his case that the synchronisation of individually distributed control systems must take place via buses.
Dr. Thorsten Molt, Head of Process Methods and Tools, reported in his presentation "Architecture modelling with integrated performance analysis" about two success stories in which Hella was able to discover errors at an early stage due to the use of model based development. During the presentation, Dr. Molt explained how the SPICE development methodology requires consideration and documentation of dynamic behaviour and how the integrated model utilises the interconnection of Rhapsody and chronSIM.
The conclusion to the technical presentations began with Thomas Hörbrand and Stefan Teuchert from MAN Nutzfahrzeuge presenting a comparison of requirements for the operation of trucks and cars. When developing their E/E architecture and dedicated control modules, a backbone provided the function data management, which in turn gave rise to software and documentation management. On the basis of this background information, the speakers talked about the "Software architecture for a central control module in the drivetrain of commercial vehicles", the Power Train Manager (PTM), as well as about scheduling and code generation.
The congress delegates took advantage of the breaks to engage in intensive networking. At the INCHRON demo-stations they were able to find out about restbus simulation and the modelling of distributed systems with chronSIM. The composition of response times and analysis of mixed synchronous and asynchronous systems with chronVAL were also key topics for delegates at the real-time development congress.
Conclusions of the 2nd Congress on Real-time Development:
Real-time developments are becoming increasingly aligned to timing in order to ensure that all aspects of a project can be actively managed at an early stage. Such an approach also leads to time and cost savings in downstream development processes. With chronVAL and chronSIM, for instance, an implementation can be completed and be productive within just a few days. The speakers and real-time experts present agreed that this was ample justification for the use of such tools!
