F2008-12-271
Engineering Software at the Vehicle Level
While engineering software at the module level in an automobile is a well established process, doing so at the vehicle level is not. With the large & growing complexity of electronics & software --- over 60 processors, tens of megabytes of embedded software, over 5 networks, both wired and wireless and millions of interactions between modules, there is a well recognized need to design, model, create software at the vehicle level. With a view to reduce hardware complexity, the automotive industry has begun to design software separately from, although often concurrently with, hardware. This effort is happening both pre-competitively (in the form of AUTOSAR, for example) to establish standards, and competitively to differentiate on feature execution and cost engineering. The separation of software from hardware allows new degrees of freedom: application specific software can be bundled in a number of ways based on manufacturer requirements and targeted to run on general purpose hardware. This reduces the number of unique hardware modules, while increasing the number of functional roles a given type of module may play. Although the number of module (hardware) platforms is beginning to be lowered, the total number of modules per vehicle continues to increase. High-volume vehicles often have about 20 modules and the high-end vehicles are known to have as many as 80 modules. This growth in the number of modules per vehicle, coupled with the exponential increase in the number of interactions between modules, has resulted in a rapid increase in software complexity and associated design, verification & validation challenges. What is becoming evident is that software engineering at the module level, while necessary, is clearly no longer sufficient. Software needs to be designed at the total vehicle system level.
While a total vehicle software system design remains the desired goal, this paper reviews our work up to an intermediate step of being able to model software for interactions between body electronic systems, driver information systems and entertainment systems. Results from experimental analyses and prototype vehicle builds are presented.
Session: Vehicle Development