Its members are primarily international car manufacturers, suppliers and engineering service providers from the automotive industry.

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.

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.

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).

Major member companies are BMW, Bosch, Continental, Daimler, Denso, Delphi, GM, Honda, SAIC, Toyota, TRW, Volkswagen and Volvo.

ASAM standards are an insurance for OEMs and Tier-1s that their investment in testing and development equipment is stable and can be reused for the long term.

The primary goal of the TSC is to ensure that the standard portfolio of ASAM meets market needs and stays competitive.

The committee evaluates technical proposals, monitors the progress of ongoing projects, and reviews and releases new or revised standards.

The process is started via an "Issue Proposal" to ASAM, which describes the desired goals, use-cases, technical content, estimated resources and a project plan.

The remaining 75% is covered by the participating companies of the project via work commitments, contributions of existing documents or funds.

ASAM provides the work infrastructure for the project team, i.e. an issue tracking system, a file repository and versioning control system, means for remote conferencing, process descriptions and guidelines, document templates and the support through the staff of its head office.

Once the project team members determine that the standard is ready for release, they submit the deliverables for review to the TSC.

The standards cover processes and tool-chains in these areas and have the goal to reduce the development, integration and maintenance efforts for them.

ASAM standards cover specific use-cases and are developed according to the following guiding principles: Consequently, they are vendor- and technology-independent, which keeps system components of different origin interchangeable and decouples them from the continuous advances of IT platforms.

They focus on: Client and server may reside on different host systems, communicate via TCP/IP and are suitable for static tests execution.