ASOA - A Dynamic Software Architecture for Software-defined Vehicles

Authors

A. Kampmann, A. Mokhtarian, S. Kowalewski, B. Alrifaee - i11 Embedded Software, RWTH Aachen University

Summary

This paper presents the Automotive Service-oriented Architecture (ASOA), a software architecture for Software-defined vehicles (SDV). This term was coined to describe the increasing importance of software for the future of the automotive industry. Architectures in many technical domains are changing to realize the SDV vision. Yet, in our opinion, a suitable, end-to-end SDV software architecture is still missing. In contrast to traditional, design-time integrated architectures, a system implemented using ASOA is dynamically integrated at the execution time of the system. ASOA facilitates separation of non-modular aspects related to system integration from system-agnostic software services. We argue that this separation enables adaptation of the software architecture with little side effects on software services. Processing within ASOA services can be introspected, which makes it possible to optimize causality chains that span across multiple services. We believe that the approach behind ASOA is a key enabler to shorten development cycles and time to market of software innovations. ASOA comes with a portable implementation and tooling for collaborative system engineering. Its application has been demonstrated in four full-scale automated vehicle prototypes.