A Dynamic Service-Oriented Software Architecture for Highly Automated Vehicles

Abstract

We present an ecosystem comprised of multiple building blocks that are centered around a simple, pragmatic concept for service-oriented architectures (SOA). Due to rigid design-time integration, today's prevailing automotive electric, electronic and software architectures are often unsuitable for infield updates or system reconfigurations. As statically integrated architectures do not provide the flexibility required to keep up with shorter development and technology life cycles of connected and automated vehicles (AVs), service-oriented architectures are a promising way forward. We present a SOA concept that allows for dynamic, runtime integrated software architectures. Our implementation stack equally supports full-scale computers and resource-constrained platforms. We facilitate architecture specification through a web-based description tool, which follows a simple paradigm that has applications beyond software architectures. The evaluation provides benchmarks of our implementation on an automotive-grade embedded system and a trial login to our architecture specification tool.