Component-Based Integration of Interconnected Vehicle Architectures

Abstract

Mapping the logical software architecture of a vehicle to a technical solution is not a straightforward task. A particular challenge is communication: software components developed by different teams and deployed across the E/E architecture need to be able to exchange data. Middleware solutions have been developed to enable low coupling of distributed logical software components. Building a distributed architecture on a middleware solution is mostly accomplished by encapsulating logical components into middleware wrappers. This is not only time-consuming, but also requires platform-specific understanding, and results in a multitude of architectural variants tailored for particular set-ups. For instance, lengthy validation processes ensuring functional correctness and safety require simulations of intelligent vehicle systems in different simulators, environments, and on different abstraction levels. This leads to the necessity of individual integration schemes for both simulation and deployment. We propose a component-based modeling approach separating platform-agnostic logical models from middleware aspects. Therefore, the model compiler is instrumented with middleware tags related to the elements of the logical model. Generating the required middleware code automatically, we aim at better component re-usability minimizing the need for hand-crafted glue-code for interprocess and simulator integration.