ARText - Variant Handling Features

The support for variant handling is one of the important new features introduced in AUTOSAR 4.0. The ARText variant handling features provide an easy way to specify variants and variation points. These will be available with the release of Artop 3.0.

Highlights

Variant Specification

The ARText language allows the textual specification of system constants, value sets and predefined variants. These are the basic building blocks for specifying variants in AUTOSAR.

Variation Point Editing

The variation point view can be used to edit binding constraints and binding times of variation points. Binding constraints are defined by AUTOSAR formulas that can be directly added in the variation point view Formulas are specified in a human-readable way directly within the form. On save, the formula will be converted to its equivalent AUTOSAR XML. This exhibits that ARText languages support projectional editing, namely that they can work directly on AUTOSAR XML instead of being stored in a separate file.

Variant Evaluation

Variant evaluation is the process of transforming a variant-enriched AUTOSAR model into a variant specific one. The evaluation is performed by evaluating binding constraints based on a given variant. Using the ARText-based implementation of the AUTOSAR formula language, this is already supported in Artop, for example, the AUTOSAR browser can filter AUTOSAR elements based on a given variant.