Dynamic Platforms for Uncertainty Management in Future Automotive E/E Architectures
Philipp Mundhenk, Ghizlane Tibba, Licong Zhang, Felix Reimann, Debayan Roy, Samarjit Chakraborty · 2017
Current automotive E/E architectures are comprised of hardware and software and are mostly designed in a monolithic approach, static over the lifetime of the vehicle. Design, implementation and updates are mostly performed on a per-component-basis, exchanging complete Electronic Control Units (ECUs) or their software image as a whole. With an increasing amount of functionality being realized in software, the benefits of software can be used increasingly. This includes modularization of components, which forms the basis for updates and addition of functions. Additionally, this modularization allows the consolidation of ECUs and supports a higher level of integration. Such modularization and dynamic behavior over the lifetime of a vehicle feet, as well as a single vehicle does, however, hold a lot of challenges for safety-critical systems. Safety-critical systems, such as cars, require their behavior to be deterministic. The design of such modular systems needs to consider and cope with uncertainties in modular architectures. This paper highlights some of the dimensions of uncertainty, which will exist in future E/E architectures and presents initial approaches on how to manage these.