For the past year, the Green Reapers team at Genova Technologies has been helping a group at a large Midwestern agricultural company as it works towards its first release of an AUTOSAR compliant product. AUTOSAR is a worldwide partnership that has been working to standardize software architecture that has been utilized in the automotive industry and was founded in 2003. In response to changing technology needs, the leadership team at the agricultural company determined that this would be a good time to drive towards the AUTOSAR standard and the Green Reapers team has been one of 8 teams in the group that have been working on updating and standardizing our software to comply with the AUTOSAR standard. Not much has changed from the day to day development perspective of using AUTOSAR, however, the biggest gains that we’ve seen have been the ability to develop software that is not intended for a single embedded device and a higher focus on good design practices through early definition of the interfaces between control logic pieces. Through the use of AUTOSAR standardization, when the control logic is being developed, the development team is developing the software to be device agnostic and through the use of physical and virtual communication buses, agnostic to where other components that it shares data with are placed. This has allowed our software to be developed to be much more interoperable, reusable, stable, and with higher quality than we had seen in previous development. While there have been many challenges as there are numerous tool and workflow updates, the Green Reapers team has been helping our group lead the charge to making AUTOSAR compliant products.
