Design of control strategies for automotive applications is generally a difficult problem because of the great number of constraints, that should be taken into account. Some of them are industrial constraints such as reduction of development and production cost and time, improvement of vehicle quality, reliability, performance and security, respect of pollutant emission laws. Others are due to the nature itself of systems, which are strongly non-linear, with time-varying or uncertain parameters and should be controlled by realtime embarked computers. So, a systematic approach is necessary to guarantee all required specifications at each stage of control law design and development. This paper presents such a methodology, applied at PSA company, and illustrates it in the context of engine control.