Association for Standardisation of Automation and Measuring Systems

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The Association for Standardisation of Automation and Measuring Systems ( ASAM eV ) is a registered association under German law. Its members are predominantly global vehicle manufacturers, suppliers and engineering services to the automotive industry. The association coordinates the development of technical standards that are developed in project groups by experts of its member companies. The ASAM 's vision is that all the tools of a development process chain can be connected together and a continuous data exchange is possible. These standards define the protocols, file formats and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs ) for software development and testing of automotive ECUs. A variety of common tools in the field of simulation, testing and application systems and test automation conforms to ASAM standards. The conformity is to enable the interaction of tools from different vendors that guarantee an exchange of data without data conversion and ensure the exchange of unique specifications between manufacturers and suppliers.

ASAM standards are based on other public standards such as UML, XML and CORBA, and are thus independent of specific IT technologies and platforms. Furthermore, the ASAM working in the standardization work closely with other organizations such as the ISO or AUTOSAR together.

History

During the economic crisis of the late 80s and early 90s, the automobile industry was under a great cost and rationalization pressure. Of the areas of metrology and test automation were not exempt. The tools in this area were mostly specialty and custom developments with predominantly incompatible interfaces and data formats, the disabled an interplay of different tools and data exchange. The head of development at Audi, BMW, Daimler -Benz, Porsche and Volkswagen have subsequently decided to cooperate and 1991, the working group for standardization of automation and measuring systems ( ASAM ) has been launched. Unlike previous standardization bodies where standards have unilaterally decided and dictated their suppliers, OEMs, were involved from the beginning to the suppliers in the standard development as equal partners with the ASAM. This has ensured that their technological know -how had some influence and the standards with commercially reasonable efforts were implemented in products and services.

The standard development was advanced in 1996 by the STAUMECS EU project. Because the number and importance of standards rose steadily, was established on 1 December 1998 in Stuttgart, the ASAM eV, the law represents the standards and ensure their dissemination.

Chronology

Members

ASAM has over 130 corporate members worldwide. They originate mainly from the automotive industry, although ASAM not limited membership to this industry. The biggest member companies are BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Denso, Delphi, GM, Honda, PSA, SAIC, Toyota, TRW, Volkswagen and Volvo.

Member companies can be roughly divided into three categories:

  • End user: OEMs and their suppliers, which mainly apply tools and processes according to ASAM standards
  • Offer tool manufacturers and service providers who implement ASAM standards in tooling and engineering services: ASAM system suppliers
  • Education institutions: universities and research institutes

Members pay an annual fee, which is dependent on the number of their employees. This gives you free access to all ASAM standards and checker tools and can use for the development of tools and the scope of services. Furthermore allowed membership changes or new developments of standards propose and to participate in their development.

Typically, major OEMs and suppliers have a strong interest in standards to replace proprietary and internally developed systems and to become independent of each tool manufacturers or costly proprietary developments. The use of ASAM standards enables OEMs and suppliers to reuse test and development systems several times and secures your investment long term.

ASAM system suppliers also have a distinct advantage because the standards create a global, independent OEM market for their products. The standards allow them products without costly custom development for sale to end users worldwide. This minimizes development costs and maximize returns. Those companies that are actively involved in the development of standards, have added a "first- to-market" advantage.

Asam's strength lies in the very large number of system suppliers. Almost two thirds of all member companies belong to this group. Accordingly, ASAM -compliant tools and services on a large scale are available. After a experts estimate there alone for MCD systems worldwide about 500 products.

Organizational structure

ASAM is organized as a registered association. The structure allows the integration of new members into the existing organization.

The highest decision-making organ of the ASAM is the general meeting. Each member company has voting rights in proportion to their annual membership fee. The delegates elect alternate between two -year cycle of the Management Board and the Technical Steering Committee. They also relieve the Board, approve changes in the statutes and vote on important strategic decisions.

The Board has operational responsibility for the club. It consists of up to five members. The Board represents the ASAM on all legal and public affairs, is responsible for the finances of the Association, shall decide on inclusion or exclusion of members, sets out guidelines for the other bodies and for the Office, developed a long-term strategy for the club and checked its implementation.

The Technical Steering Committee (TSC ) is primarily concerned with the technical and market aspects of the ASAM standards. The committee consists of a maximum of 10 delegates from ASAM member companies. The main objective of the TSC is to ensure that the standard portfolio of ASAM meet the market demands and remain competitive. The Panel reviewed technical proposals, tracks the progress of the working groups and are new or revised standards free.

The actual development work on the standards takes place in the ASAM project groups. These groups may be closed to other members, which means so much that only those companies can deploy the project group members, who originally proposed the standard. An open project group, however, may invite other members to collaborate on the standard. Project groups focused on either the new or further development of standards ( FVD Project: Future version Development Project ), or perform maintenance of the standard, such as minor revisions or corrections of errors (Maintenance Project).

ASAM has an office near Munich, which ensures the distribution of standards, an IT infrastructure for project groups maintains, provides technical support for questions about standards, and technical marketing and general support members carried out.

Standard development process

Standard developments, further developments or corrections are initiated on the initiative of the members. The process is started with a so-called " Issue Proposal", contains the purpose, use cases, technical content, estimated resources and a project plan. The proposal is given to the other members for the purpose of commentary known. After a minimum talk time of six weeks, and the comments of the proposal be submitted to the TSC for assessment and decision. If the necessary resources are available and the TSC accepts the proposal, the project can be started.

25% of the required budget are usually worn by the ASAM. The remaining 75 % borne by the participating companies in the project, for example by working the project group members, the provision of existing documents or funds. Prerequisite for the implementation of a project is the cooperation of at least three member companies of the project group.

The ASAM provides the infrastructure for the project work group is available, consisting of an issue tracking system, a file repository and versioning system, a conferencing system, process descriptions and guidelines, templates and the support of the Office.

The project team selects a project manager who is responsible for the organization of work of the group, support their work progress and shall ensure that the group associated with the approved project remains. The ASAM Office ordered a Maintenance Project Manager for the development of existing standards, which performs operational work for the project group. Otherwise, the project group organized independently and according to their own needs.

The project members work during the implementation phase of the project on standard through regular meetings, telephone conferences or independent work. The Project Manager will report to the TSC regularly report on the progress of the project.

Once the project members determine that their standard is ready for release, they submit their work for review by the results of a TSC. Work results can be documents, schemas, reference code, or sample files. The project presents the new standard in the TSC meeting. The TSC and the Board may authorize the release. Then the ASAM Office published the release and puts it for download for its members.

Standard portfolio

ASAM standards are mainly used in the automotive industry. They deal mainly with the definition of communication interfaces between the measurement, calibration, diagnostic and test equipment. The standards cover process and tool chains from in these areas and have the goal to reduce the effort for their development, integration and maintenance. ASAM standards relating to specific applications and are developed according to the following basic principles:

  • Independent of hardware platform and operating system
  • Using object modeling
  • Definition of semantics and syntax
  • Independence of the physical data storage

Thus, they are vendor-and technology-independent, which makes the system components from different sources interchangeable and they decoupled from continuous development of IT platforms. Investments in tools and processes are thus stable in the long term.

ASAM used conventional description methods for the technology definitions in the standards:

  • Format Description: defines the syntax and semantics of a file format for data exchange.
  • API defines interfaces and functional behavior of executable routines to be used as callable services and for exchanging data between computer programs.
  • Protocol Definition: defined syntax, semantics and synchronization of a communication bus, to form a connection between two computer systems.
  • Technology Reference: specifies a technology-dependent interpretation of a technology-independent part of the standard, typically via mapping rules or code.
  • Application Area Companion: defines an extension to the basic standards for a specific application or device type.
  • Transport layer specification defines the implementation of a generic protocol definition to a concrete, physical layer.

ASAM, the standard divided into three groups, which are briefly described in the following tables:

  • CAT Computer Aided Testing
  • COMMON: General standards for AE and CAT

ASAM AE Standards ( Automotive Electronics ) are mainly used during the design and implementation phases of ECU software (left side of the V- Models ). You have at its core:

  • The design of functional and interface specifications for software components
  • The implementation of measurement, calibration and diagnostic tasks on the control unit
  • The automation of HIL test
  • The description of development artifacts
  • The exchange of development needs

ASAM standards CAT (Computer Aided Testing) are mainly used for the verification and validation of ECU software (right-hand side of the V - model ), the automated application and the system test on the engine and vehicle dynamometers. You have at its core:

  • The automated application
  • The storage of test data
  • Evaluation and analysis of test data
  • Player Support: controlling the actuators for adjusting the test reference values
  • Recorder Service: Award of measurement data (actual or average values) from the test bed
  • Watcher service: monitoring of limits of the measurement data
  • Device service: additional control unit-specific or test bench specific services

The client and server may run on different host systems, are connected via TCP / IP, and are capable of performing static tests. Includes guidelines for middleware implementation with CORBA, an interface definition file and a description for the interface certification testing.

  • Layer 4: Coordinator services for the translation of measurement and control instructions of test automation systems in device driver instructions
  • Layer 3: Drivers for uniform access to different devices
  • Layer 2: Platform Adapter for uniform interfaces to specific devices or operating system services
  • Layer 1: transport layer, and communication modes for data exchange with devices using IPv4, USB, SoftSync, COM or LPT

Standard defines APIs for all layers and is ready formats for the description of device properties and data connections. Includes Companion standards of communication to vehicle test stands, crash test devices, multi-channel DAQ systems and a picture of MCD -3 on GDI. Includes schema and C header files and sample files to formats description and implementation. Also available as ISO 20242, but without the automotive-specific companion standards and code.

  • A basic data model
  • Derived application models
  • A model of relational databases for the physical storage of data
  • An API for accessing data from the database
  • An API for accessing meta information about the application model, which is subject to the database
  • Two file formats (one in XML) for the file-based data exchange

Contains application models to vehicle geometry, NVH, Teststandkalibrierdaten, bus data and test processes. Includes schema and interface definition files, plus sample files description formats.

Evaluation strategy
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