The AJACS Initiative

AJACS is a two-year project partially funded by the European Commission. Its objective is to specify, develop and demonstrate an open technology allowing the use of Java in deeply embedded automotive ECUs such as engine control systems.

An open technology is being defined that will:

	rely on existing standards of the automotive industry, in particular OSEK/VDX,
	fully retain the benefits expected from object oriented language programming in terms of software structuring, reusability, dependability,
	fully retain the WORA (Write Once Run Anywhere) and robustness attributes associated with Java,
	support the same kind of real-time constraints which non Java based ECUs currently handle,
	target the type of electronic configurations that are in use in the industry: 16 and 32 bit microcontrollers and memory footprints ranging from 64 Kbytes to several hundred Kbytes (ROM) for the whole system.

Mechanisms and APIs are being defined to:

	support typical standards of automotive control systems, e.g. specific APIs for diagnosis, communication, and network management, support the OSEK/VDX standard, and coexist with OSEK/VDX based applications written in C,
	conform to future Java deeply embedded standards and Java real-time standards,
	address typical timing constraint issues for automotive control systems,
	address programming language issues such as
	memory management issues (e.g. garbage collection, persistent objects),
	synchronization issues (e.g. priority inversion),
	support for asynchronous external events (e.g. support of interrupt handlers in Java),
	support for asynchronous thread notification,
	address distributed communication and multiplexing needs (e.g. use of CAN, subsystem management),
	allow for the right level of CPU performance (e.g. native code generation), and allow the development of device drivers in Java.

AJACS work will is being carried out in close collaboration with currently available specification efforts (Java Community Process, J consortium, OSEK/VDX).