An Investigation of the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform from an Industry Perspective
2026-07-06 • Software Engineering
Software Engineering
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied challenges faced when creating software using the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform, a standard framework for automotive software. They built a simple version of the platform to investigate these difficulties and found that problems come from the platform’s design, how vendors implement it, and how developers use it locally. Some issues are due to the platform’s architecture and goals for reusing software. The authors suggest better tools and training are needed to help developers manage configurations and understand the system’s operation.
AUTOSAR Adaptive Platformsoftware architectureservice-oriented architectureautomotive softwaresoftware reuseplatform specificationvendor implementationconfiguration managementdesign science research
Authors
Bengt Haraldsson, Srijita Basu, Miroslaw Staron, Erika Mayer
Abstract
The reliance on software as a distinguishing factor in the automotive industry is increasing. With a combined reliance on vendor-supplied software and cost-effective implementation, the AUTOSAR consortium was initialized to provide standardized platform specifications that enable re-use. Specifically, the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform (AP) specification aims to provide a high-performance service-oriented architecture. Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate what pain-points emerge when developing AUTOSAR Adaptive applications and whether they originate from the platform specification, its vendor-implementation, or its local usage. Methods: We conduct a Design Science Research study, developing a minimal AP that serves as an experimental prototype for our investigation. Results: We find that a combination of specification-inherent, implementation-based, and local practices contributes to the emergence of pain-points. Conclusions: We conclude that there are AUTOSAR specification-inherent reasons for pain-points, resulting from architectural choices and re-use goals. The implication for development organizations is the need to mitigate these effects through tooling that better supports configuration file management and reduces developer training time to properly understand the adaptive application runtime life-cycle.