Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems or ASAM is an incorporated association under German law. Its members are primarily international car manufacturers, suppliers and engineering service providers from the automotive industry. The association coordinates the development of technical standards, which are developed by working groups composed of experts from its member companies. ASAM pursues the vision that the tools of a development process chain can be freely interconnected and allow a seamless exchange of data. The standards define protocols, data models, file formats and application programming interfaces (APIs) for the use in the development and testing of automotive electronic control units. A large amount of popular tools in the areas of simulation, measurement, calibration and test automation are compliant to ASAM standards. Compliance shall guarantee interoperability of tools from different vendors, allow data exchange without the need for converters, and facilitate the exchange of unambiguous specification between customers and suppliers. ASAM standards utilize other public standards such as UML, XML and CORBA, hence remaining independent from specific IT technologies or platforms. Furthermore, ASAM closely cooperates with other organizations such as ISO and AUTOSAR. History During the economic crisis at the end of the 1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the automotive industry was under high pressure to cut costs and to optimize their internal processes. One area identified for cost savings was the measurement and testing area for vehicle development. The equipment used there had been mostly purpose-built solutions, with widely incompatible interfaces and data formats, which severely impeded interconnectivity and exchange of data. The directors of development from Audi, BMW, Daimler-Benz, Porsche and Volkswagen agreed to cooperate in this area and founded in 1991 the "Arbeitskreis zur Standardisierung von Automatisierungs- und Messsystemen" (ASAM, Eng., working group for the standardization of automation and measuring systems). Unlike earlier standardization efforts, where standards were created by OEMs and unilaterally imposed on suppliers, ASAM had the goal right from the beginning to include suppliers in the standard development process as equal partners. This measure brought in their technological know-how and ensured that the standards are feasible and result in cost-effective products. The first standards that came out of ASAM were ASAM ODS, ASAM-G (predecessors of today's ASAM GDI), ASAM ACS-I (predecessors of ASAM ACI) and the series of ASAM ASAP-1, -2 and -3 standards (predecessors of ASAM MCD-1, -2, -3). In 1996, the EU-funded project STAUMECS further supported the development of