Third INCHRON Real-Time Congress in Munich a Success

At the start of this year's industry gathering, attendants had the opportunity of participating in a full-day INCHRON Tool-Suite training course or a half-day introductory course at the INCHRON offices in Garching near Munich.

Afterwards everybody gathered at the well-attended “Meet the Experts” event where developers and decision makers from TRW, Elektrobit, Valeo and Intel exchanged experiences with representatives from Robert Bosch, the technical universities and other participants.

In her keynote speech, Meg A. Selfe, Vice President Complex & Embedded Systems at IBM Rational, emphasized IBM’s dedication to innovation and the company’s roadmap to its consistent implementation.

On 29 June 2011 the event culminated in the actual Real-Time Congress. The program included presentations by top speakers and a keynote by Giuseppe Mascolino, Vice President for E / E architecture and processes of the BMW Group. In forward-looking examples, Mr. Mascolino described which real-time critical functions will soon be incorporated in cars. He also pointed to challenges in real-time development and revealed how BMW renders them in their processes.

The technical program included fascinating presentations leading to constructive discussions. Continental Automotive explained how to integrate functions of various safety levels in a system with the help of virtualization. For instance, when infotainment and other vehicle functions act on one platform, this presents major real-time behavior challenges. The INCHRON tool chronSIM enables users to find an ideal architecture and configuration fast. chronSIM also helped Audi integrate different functions of formerly disparate control units on the basis of a robust architecture, which proved much easier than the alternative of prototyping and debugging.

Autoliv used chronSIM successfully in similar scenarios at various stages of development with regards to real-time behavior. BMW asked who develops good software for modern cars and described what the challenges are. The answer lies in the proper division of responsibilities between OEM and suppliers.

During a short lecture IBM Rational stressed the benefits of the integrated solutions from IBM and INCHRON. For a secure and unified database, which all tools can access, IBM offers the Jazz platform plus tools and methodologies for requirements management, modeling and quality assurance throughout the development process.

Siemens illustrated how increased demands call for multi-core processing in automation technology and how to avoid performance loss under these conditions.

The conference concluded with a joint presentation by Lear Corporation and Volkswagen. After describing the network architecture at Volkswagen and the importance of the central gateway for the next generation of vehicles, the speakers touched on the dynamic requirements and tasks of the gateway. They finished with the analysis of the dynamic behavior which is necessary to investigate the specific functions of the gateway and to size it optimally.