Automotive electronic subsystems support the execution of distributed safety- and time-critical functions on a complex networked system with several buses and tens of ECUs (Electrical Control Units). Complex functions, which are designed as networks of function blocks exchanging signal information, are deployed onto the physical HW and implemented in a SW architecture consisting of a set of tasks and messages. For example, an advanced braking system, implemented on a set of four ECUs, will take responsibility of applying brakes and tightening seat belts within 80 milliseconds when it senses danger.

The objectives of this thesis are to develop analysis and synthesis techniques for vehicle electronic system designers (i) to analyze worse case situations, (ii) to select appropriate mapping of functionality to architectural elements and (iii) to set corresponding design parameters; making sure key functionalities finish before appropriate deadlines for safety-critical applications. The design of communication subsystems is essential in guaranteeing that timing constraints are satisfied. They can be either time-triggered (TimeTriggeredArchitecture (TTA) and FlexRay) or event-triggered such as CAN. Being able to accommodate incremental design changes while preserving a legacy design may reduce design and verification times substantially. For CAN systems, schedulability theory allows the analysis of the worst case end-to-end latencies and the evaluation of the possible architecture configurations options with respect to timing constraints, but it can also be used in the exploration of the software architecture configurations what can best support the target application. The optimization techniques presented in this thesis are based on JLP (integer linear programming) formulation combined with search algorithms and can derive implementations of both time-triggered and event triggered system that fulfill the design constraints. The techniques proposed are evaluated using industrial examples to prove the effectiveness of the work.