Variability, hard real time, increasing functional complexity (due to emissions and driveability standards), limited hardware (HW) resources: these are some of the - sometimes antagonistic - constraints a modern Engine Management Software (EMS) has to deal with. In addition, to face the price reductions in the automotive electronics industry, an intensive reuse strategy is deployed, based on a platform architecture and a component based development, despite the high functional coupling between those components, characteristics to the engine management area.

After an overall description of the EMS content, we will describe in this paper the most common integration failures with impact on the dynamic behavior, and means to avoid them. We will also show the importance of the architecture and integration activities in the specific area of engine management, in particular due to the above mentioned constant of strong coupling.