The German automotive industry is currently facing significant challenges. On the one hand, it is operating in saturated and contested markets with declining sales figures due to longer vehicle operating times. On the other hand, it has to meet growing expectations of customers with regard to vehicle upgradeability and intelligent driving functionality. The vehicle therefore must transition to a software-defined platform that is no longer sold as a one-off, but can be continuously adapted to dynamic customer requirements during its lifetime by adding new driving functions. Political and economic institutions have become aware of the transition needs and initiated actions. For instance, the European Commission is tackling current developments in the context of the European Chips Act and is pursuing a uniform strategy and architecture for the software-defined vehicles. Service orientation is viewed as a key aspect of future vehicle architectures in order to achieve the decoupling of vehicle components and thus enable flexible reconfigurability. Building upon those artifacts, we will present a novel service-oriented E/E architecture concept in this paper, designed for upgradeability through loosely coupled, flexibly interacting services. The main contribution of this paper will be an extension of the aforementioned concept, allowing the seamless integration of intelligent sensors in vehicles. We are thereby focusing on an elementary aspect of service-oriented vehicle architectures which, according to our research, has not yet been sufficiently addressed. We prove our concept on a physical demonstrator setup and show that, in addition to flexible reconfigurability of sensor hardware and software, the concept also enables dynamic adaptation, calibration and fusion of sensor signals.
Session:
E/E-Architecture
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| 18:05 - 18:35