With the evolvement of open, standardized architectures like AUTOSAR variant management becomes a core theme and problem to solve for the platform. Existing mechanisms like #IFDEF as used with the C Pre-Processor no longer work with new languages like C# and JAVA, and formats like XML. So how do you go about managing variability at a granular level?

With the evolvement of open, standardized architectures like AUTOSAR variant management becomes a core theme and problem to solve for the platform. Existing mechanisms like #IFDEF as used with the C Pre-Processor no longer work with new languages like C# and JAVA, and formats like XML. So how do you go about managing variability at a granular level?

Fortunately some smart people have though about this, and tools like pure::variants provide methods and mechanism to manage and variability in the architecture. These mechanisms can help in a variety of ways, for example by injecting or removing blocks or conditional XML by feature selection.

Mario Friedrich and Dr. Jörg-Volker Müller have explored these concepts in more detail in an article about variant management with AUTOSAR. They take a practical look comparing the way things have been handled the old way with the C Pre-processor, and about how to migrate these concepts to the AUTOSAR platform. The examples make use of pure::variants. You can download the article here.

Mario Friedrich and Olaf Kindel have also just released a book about software development with AUTOSAR, in which they elaborate on how AUTOSAR can enable effective variant management. "Softwareentwicklung mit AUTOSAR"

 

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