AUTOSAR™
The AUTOSAR™ standards are provided by the AUTOSAR™ organization headquartered in Munich, Germany. The standards are divided into CLASSIC, ADAPTIVE and FOUNDATION.
Every organization that wishes to help develop these standards or use these standards for their own products must pay a fee or purchase a license. This ensures a continuous maintenance and evolution of those standards.
If you would like to get started with AUTOSAR™, you will need to purchase licensed tools and a licensed MCAL version from one of the dedicated companies (e.g., Vector, Elektrobit, or HiTex).
CLASSIC Platform
The CLASSIC Platform provides three different layers, the application software (APP), the runtime environment (RTE) and the basic software (BSW). The application software layer is supposed to be mostly hardware independent. The communication between the APP and the BSW is organized by the RTE.
The BSW is further subdivided into Services (SER) , ECU abstraction layer (ECU), Microcontroller abstraction layer (MCAL) and finally Complex drivers (CD). SERs are even further subdivided into functional groups representing the infrastructure for system, memory and communication services.
Fortunately, all of this is documented and freely accessible on AUTOSARs webpage. However, due to the huge amount of information the implementation effort is still very high.
ADAPTIVE Platform
The AUTOSAR™ Adaptive Platform implements the AUTOSAR Runtime for Adaptive Applications (ARA). Two types of interfaces are available: services and APIs. The platform consists of functional clusters that are grouped by service and according to the Adaptive AUTOSAR™ Basis.
The idea behind this approach is to dynamically link services and clients during runtime inside the RTE.
FOUNDATION
The purpose of the Foundation standard is to enforce interoperability between the AUTOSAR™ platforms. Foundation contains common requirements and technical specifications (for example, protocols) shared between the AUTOSAR™ platforms.