EAST-ADL: An Architecture Description Language for Automotive Software-intensive Systems in the Light of Recent use and Research

EAST-ADL is an Architecture Description Language (ADL) initially defined in several European-funded research projects and aligned with AUTOSAR and ISO26262. 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 article the authors describe EAST-ADL in detail, show how it relates to AUTOSAR as well as other significant automotive standards and present recent research work on using and advancing EAST-ADL, the functional safety standard ISO 26262, heterogeneous multi / many core architectures, security and for multi-objective optimization.