ODX - ASAM MCD-2D - Open Diagnostic Data Exchange

Overview

ASAM

ASAM is short for Association for Standardisation of Automation and Measuring Systems. The association was founded in December 1998 as an initiative of German Car manufacturers, and it provides standards for data models, interfaces and syntax specifications for a variety of applications, such as testing, evaluation and simulation.

ODX is the market name for ASAM MCD-2D automotive electronics standard. MCD stands for Measurement, Calibration and Diagnosis.

The electronics of passenger and commercial vehicles can be diagnosed, configured and programmed with new software. The design of these functions is specific to a vehicle model and/or manufacturer and thus the diagnostic capabilities of every vehicle and built-in ECU (Electronic Control Unit) are highly individual. Within the life-cycle of the vehicle (engineering, production, service, end-of-life) many tools and applications access the ECU for testing, activation, de-activation, configuration and updating purposes. Before the standardization of ODX (Open Diagnostic Data Exchange) the diagnostic and configuration capabilities as well as the flash data descriptors were specified in non-standardized, mostly non-machine readable data formats (e.g. Word, PDF). Consequently, the relevant data had to be manually entered into all tools of the life-cycle, which is error-prone, expensive and impedes fast development cycles.

ODX addresses these challenges by providing an XML-based, machine-readable data format to specify and exchange vehicle and ECU diagnostic capabilities including variants throughout the vehicle life-cycle. ASAM took great care in producing a semantically well-defined data model that is the foundation for the data format. Together with the related standards ASAM MCD-3D and ISO 22900-2 (D-PDU API), an architecture for vehicle communication has been defined that permits seamless processing of diagnostic, configuration and flash reprogramming data. This architecture enables the complete reuse of diagnostic data throughout the ECU's life-cycle and thus prevents errors and reduces effort for the creation of test-, configuration- and reprogramming-sequences.

Furthermore, ODX is independent of particular vehicle diagnostic protocols such as the KW 2000 (ISO 14230), UDS (ISO 14229) or SAE J1939. ODX is designed as a data model to describe the structure of data streams (aka “diagnostic services”) and arbitrary protocols. In addition, specific description formats have been defined to describe configuration data structures, flash re-programming data and vehicle functions.

See ASAM and ASAM standards for more information.

Metamodel

Metamodel identifier: odx

The current ODX metamodel implementation is compliant with ASAM MCD-2D data model specification, version 2.2.0 (18-MAY-2008).

Connectors

File extensions

Model readers:

Model writers:

The writer connector checks the consistency between the model content and the selected file suffix, and warns if not compliant.

Implementation

See Metamodel Implementation Details.

Related reference
Metamodel Reference