General Information about ADD

In most publications, the automotive development process for electronic control units is described using the V-cycle. In this development process there exist several interfaces between the different process phases from requirements engineering to implementation and back to verification. Different data exchange formats are used for these different interfaces.

However, no easy and widespread data exchange format for the interface between function- and software development exists. This gap often causes inconsistencies between function- and software engineers. Moreover, large quantities of data definitions might be fragmented across a variety of files and might be redundant and inconsistent. These disparate data definitions do not adequately support the information needs of organizations in a dynamic business environment.
Therefore the objective is to map the existing data elements to "common data architecture" and to support the reuse of the data across the complete development cycle. This is one of the major challenges of a streamlined software development process. Reuse starts with the definition and maintenance of data definitions.

ADD - the short name of the tool "Automotive Data Dictionary" provides a standardization of all variable definitions for the customer. The user is supported in performing the integration step and several check operations are allocated.

The ADD database contains user information, container information, data objects and data types. ADD helps to ensure consistency, correct data declaration and reusability of data objects and -types. At the same time ADD avoids redundancy of data due to company wide availability and uniqueness of these data.