Abstract

The availability of functionality is a crucial aspect of mission- and safety-critical systems. This is for instance demonstrated by the pursuit to automate road transportation. Here, the driver is not obligated to be part of the control loop, thereby requiring the underlying system to remain operational even after a critical component failure. Advances in the field of mixed-criticality research have allowed to address this topic of fail-operational system behaviour more efficiently. For instance, general purpose computing platforms may relinquish the need for dedicated backup units, as their purpose can be redefined at runtime. Based on this, a deterministic and resource-efficient reconfiguration mechanism is developed, in order to address safety concerns with respect to availability in a generic manner. To find a configuration for this mechanism that can ensure all availability-related safety properties, a design-time method to automatically generate schedules for different modes of operations from declaratively defined requirements is established. To cope with the inherent computational complexity, heuristics are developed to effectively narrow the problem space. Subsequently, this method’s applicability and scalability are respectively evaluated qualitatively within an automotive case study and quantitatively by means of a tool performance analysis.

Abstract

International audience; Future vehicles are expected to evolve towards enabling fully electric and autonomous driving. However, technically this evolution requires fundamental changes of traditional automotive engineering principles. Specifically, challenges arise for the Electric/Electronic (E/E) vehicle architectures as underlying basis for almost all car functionalities. Higher demands on vehicle system's flexibility and dependability have to be incorporated. We present a novel approach for such future E/E-architectures which considers these requirements as first principles by exploiting runtime adaptation capabilities. Based on use cases, a generic hardware and software architecture is presented which enables technology-independent realization of the provided concepts. Additionally, the incorporated generic failure management and design support are introduced. The approach has been evaluated in different prototype demonstrators, including an e-vehicle prototype compromising enhanced driving functionality. Thereby, the advantages of the concepts for future vehicle E/E-architectural development could be highlighted.