Waterfall is too slow, let's go Agile: Multi-domain Coupling for Synthesizing Automotive Cyber-Physical Systems

For future autonomous vehicles, the system development life cycle must keep up with the rapid rate of innovation and changing needs of the market. Waterfall is too slow to react to such changes, and therefore, there is a growing emphasis to adopt Agile development concepts in the automotive industry. Ensuring requirements traceability, and thus proving functional safety, is a serious challenge in this direction. Modern cars are complex cyber-physical systems and are traditionally designed using a set of disjoint tools, which adds to the challenge. In this paper, we point out that multi-domain coupling and design automation using correct-by-design approaches can lead to safe designs even in an Agile environment. In this context, we study current industry trends. We further outline the challenges involved in multi-domain coupling and demonstrate using a state-of-the-art approach how these challenges can be addressed by exploiting domain-specific knowledge.