EAST-ADL: An Architecture Description Language for Automotive Software-Intensive Systems

EAST-ADL is an Architecture Description Language (ADL) initially defined in several European-funded research projects and subsequently refined and aligned with the more recent AUTOSAR automotive standard. It provides a comprehensive approach for defining automotive electronic systems through an information model that captures engineering information in a standardized form. Aspects covered include vehicle features, requirements, analysis functions, software and hardware components, and communication. The representation of the system’s implementation is not defined in EAST-ADL itself but by AUTOSAR. However, traceability is supported from EAST-ADL’s lower abstraction levels to the implementation level elements in AUTOSAR. In this chapter, the authors describe EAST-ADL in detail, show how it relates to AUTOSAR as well as other significant automotive standards, and present current research work on using EAST-ADL in the context of fully-electric vehicles, the functional safety standard ISO 26262, and for multi-objective optimization.