In the German automotive industry, there is a consortium of car manufacturers and automotive equipment suppliers made up of the companies BMW AG, Daimler Benz AG, Porsche AG, Volkswagen AG, Robert Bosch GmbH, Hella KG Hueck Co. and Siemens AG.
Figure 9:
MSR supports the joint development of car manufacturers and their electronic control system suppliers by enabling process synchronization and proper management of information exchange.
Within the work of MSR a whole set of related DTDs are developed and used in projects:
MSRSYS.DTD
This database oriented DTD is used to describe an to specify entire control systems with all its mechanical and electrical components. This DTD provides detailed structures for project data, architectures, signals, connections, electrical, properties, mechanical properties. This DTD was successfully used in multiple projects within a big automotive manufacturer and his suppliers.
MSRNET.DTD
This highly database oriented DTD is used to transport information about networks in the vehicle. It allows to specify the information transported on the network, how this information is packed into messages, the network topology etc. This DTD is implemented as import/export facility in the CAN tools from Vector Informatik (http://www.vector-informatik.de ). This DTD is actually used by another automotive manufacturer to support databases for the next generation of automotive networks.
MSRSW.DTD
This highly database oriented DTD is used to specify the software for ECU s. The examples in this presentation were taken from applications with MSRSW.DTD. This DTD is successfully used in projects across companies as well as across different business units in one company while each partner uses different engineering tools and SGML/XML tools. This DTD is supported in the system design tools ASCET (http://www.etas.de )
In one case a single document of thousands of pages as well as on-line documentation is generated using MSRSW.DTD. Parts are contributed by the customer as well as Bosch engineers and merged on SGML/XML level. In the same project, data definitions are transferred in the same instance and introduced in the software build process.
MSRFMEA.DTD
. This data model was generalized to eliminate the tool specifics.
MSRREP.DTD
This presentation oriented DTD is used to write reports and specifications not yet covered by the other DTDs. All the MSR documentation is done using MSRREP.DTD.
These MSR DTDs while implementing specific data models for their domain have the same basic principles:
 
5.1. Natural addressing in MSR 4.2.2. Object oriented models 4.3.4.1. Link manager Same link model for all DTDs (shown in ). This allows instances of the MSR DTDs to be linked together. The link types (see and ) are unique across the entire MSR DTD system.
 
Same basic models (free style text sections, parameters, architectures)
 
Same configuration capabilities
 
Same subclassing methods using ...class elements.
 
Elements to keep administrative data. These can be used for example to implement version control even for subtrees in one instance. This is useful if an instance is built of fragments delivered by different project partners.
 
Same generic approaches for constructing the DTDs like naming conventions, architectures etc.