ICSE 2008: Automotive Systems

30th International Conference on
Software Engineering ®
Leipzig, Germany, 10 - 18 May 2008

Call for Submissions
Experience Track on Automotive Systems

Scope

Innovations in modern automobiles are mostly driven by electronic components and embedded software. The effort spent on software development for new products in the automotive industry is steeply increasing, and so is the value of the created software assets. Automotive Software Engineering has gained significant importance and visibility in research and industry in recent years as an enabling technology and driver of innovation.

The challenges in this field are manifold and include: highly complex system architectures, a necessity for product line support, the supplier-manufacturer interface, highly heterogeneous and changing requirements, a wide functional variety from hard real-time safety critical engine control to comfort electronics and infotainment systems, long product life cycles, demanding time-to-market, and a strong need for competitive per-piece costs. Other technical challenges emerge from logical and physical distribution: in some vehicles more than 60 different electronic control units (ECUs), interconnected using multiple communication bus technologies and hundreds of signals, together provide more than 1,000 externally observable functions. Heterogeneity and distribution lead to high numbers of different configurations and variants that must be managed also from the software perspective.

Providing further innovative automobile functions with highest demands on quality and, specifically, safety, while keeping cost and resource use competitive is one of the software engineering challenges of the next decade. The field requires a sustainable integration of new software engineering methods, development processes, and tools that are specifically adapted and tailored to the automotive domain. For these reasons, the ICSE 2008 Track on Automotive Software Systems invites your contribution.

Case studies of practices that describe the application of one or more software engineering practice(s) in the automotive domain. A case study provides a detailed description of how the practice was applied and why (what problems it was intended to address), along with the results achieved.
Experience reports of projects that provide a critical review of experiences during one or more phases of an automotive software development project, mention key unaddressed problems, and draw lessons learned from that experience.
Research papers that describe how software engineering techniques, processes, or tools make, or might make, a substantial improvement in automotive systems development. We are interested in successful applications of rigorous or scientific methods and tools to software engineering challenges of the automotive domain.

Topics of Interest

We are soliciting all topics relevant for software engineering for automotive systems including (but not limited to):

Automotive software and systems engineering processes
Requirements engineering and management
Software product lines, components and reuse
Software-aware cost-models
Project management and outsourcing
Software and the vehicle life cycle
Design techniques of functional, system and software architectures for heterogeneous, distributed, feature-rich systems
Standard architectures, infrastructures and platforms (such as AUTOSAR)
Systematic quality assurance techniques, including coding standards, inspection, testing, and formal verification
Precise specification and verification of timing aspects and timing-related functionality
Dependability, reliability, safety, fault-tolerance, failure management, security, and privacy for automotive software
Automotive software services and service-oriented development
Modular software and systems integration
Variation, configuration, compatibility and conformance management
Automotive domain and architecture models, domain-specific languages, model-driven development, and code generation
Aspect-orientation and feature interaction for automotive software
Education of automotive software engineers

Submission Structure

We invite both full papers and short papers. We acknowledge that important contributions may be made in the form of preliminary results of any of the three kinds, either as full paper or as short paper, depending upon the maturity of the idea, or experience.

Papers must conform to the ICSE 2008 Format and Submission Guidelines. Short papers must be at least two pages and must not exceed four pages, and full papers should not exceed ten pages (including all text, figures, references, and appendices). The results described must be unpublished and must not be under review elsewhere.

Papers must be submitted electronically via CyberChairPRO.

Review and Evaluation Criteria

Each submission will be reviewed by at least three members of the Automotive Systems Experience Track program committee, which will make final decisions on which submissions to accept for presentation at the conference. Submissions will be evaluated based on the following criteria: Clarity of the motivation for the paper, soundness, significance and relevance of the results obtained or projected, quality and clarity of the written presentation.

All accepted contributions will be published in the ICSE 2008 conference proceedings which will also be available electronically.