How to engineer tool-chains for automotive E/E architectures?

The growing demand for both safety and comfort functionality in modern vehicles is rapidly increasing the complexity of automotive Electrical/Electronic (E/E) architectures. This makes it necessary to use specific design tools for modeling, implementing, and testing such systems. Although many tool vendors offer products covering different design and development phases, it is still cumbersome for car manufacturers to find the most appropriate tools that support their particular E/E architecture design process. And even with the proper set of tools, it remains an essential challenge to combine them into a consistent and flexible tool-chain, covering all design and development phases. This work is a first attempt to develop systematic approaches towards building such tool-chains. To this end, we provide an overview of the design process of E/E automotive architectures, its shortcomings and challenges, and study 22 possible tools currently available on the market. Based on this study, we quantify various usability and functionality aspects of the tools and use the outcome to evaluate their compatibility in terms of forming a tool-chain.