Domain Controlled Architecture
A New Approach for Large Scale Software Integrated Automotive Systems
Dominik Reinhardt
1
and Markus Kucera
2
1
BMW AG, Munich, Germany
2
University of Applied Science Regensburg, Regensburg, Germany
Dominik.Reinhardt@bmw.de, Markus.Kucera@hs-regensburg.de
Keywords:
Large Scale Software Integration, LSSI, Automotive Real Time, Multi-core, Many-core, Embedded Automo-
tive Software Architecture.
Abstract:
Electric and electronic functionalities increase exponentially in every mobility domain. The automotive in-
dustry is confronted with a rising system complexity and several restricting requirements and standards (like
AUTOSAR), in particular to design embedded software for electronic control units. To stand against rampant
functionalities software units could be restructured according to their affiliation and should not be attached to
a certain place. This can be effected by integration on single controllers. On the one hand the system wide
amount of hardware controllers could such be limited. On the other hand the workload for integration CPUs
will rise. To support this paradigm, multi-core systems can provide enough processing power in an efficient
way. This paper shows a first approach to combine automotive functionality on such a single controller.
1 INTRODUCTION
E/E (Electric/Electronic) systems represent an impor-
tant part in premium vehicles and are the major con-
tributor in creating added value for OEMs (Original
Equipment Manufacturer). The amount of vehicle
functions increases exponentially and functionalities
get more and more complex. This trend is tightened
by additional requirements like lightweight design
and construction, energy efficiency, functional safety
driven by the new ISO standard for road vehicles, and
last but not least by the development standard (AU-
TOSAR Administration, 2012) for automotive soft-
ware architecture AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open Sys-
tem ARchitecture).
Facing increasing software workload and rising
need for SW/HW robustness, there is a need for more
powerful hardware resources. Furthermore, the num-
ber of ECU (Electronic Control Unit) devices must
be reduced (Gut et al., 2012). To save fuel and extend
the crusing range of electric cars, the power consump-
tion of embedded systems and in detail of electronic
semiconductors shall be minimized (Sch
¨
ottle, 2012),
(Barthels et al., 2012). The actual state-of-the-art
in science and technology (Arbeitskreis-Multicore,
2011) shows that multi-core technology can solve the
problem in a more efficient way. Ten years ago Gor-
don Moore’s Law (Moore, 1965) was contested in the
area of consumer electronics and multi-core proces-
sors were published for general public on the market.
High performance computing systems or even mobile
devices like smart phones cannot get along without
this technology to supply the requests of processing
power. This paradigm has reached the automotive in-
dustry eventually (Schneider et al., 2010) and (Monot
et al., 2010).
Dual- or quad-core systems are already available
on the market for vehicle manufacturers. In the fu-
ture this trend will be continued and the amount of
cores will rise. Many-core controllers could revolu-
tionize current development standards and strategies.
For automotive systems it is not yet completely solved
how to obtain more and more speedup with a rising
number of cores and in comparison with small but
computationally intensive, high interconnected appli-
cations. For every single vehicle function built for
domains like chassis or powertrain it is to clarify,
how to segregate them from each other and how to
achieve given constraints in time or space. According
to Amdahl’s (Amdahl, 1967) and Gustafson’s Law
(Gustafson, 1988), to optimize the systems speedup,
software modules with less dependencies to units lo-
cated on other cores can be parallelized more effi-
ciently on probably more than 16 cores. This fact
will challenge automotive software engineers to re-
view former development techniques and design rules
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