2024 Stuttgart International Symposium
on Automotive and Engine Technology

The emergence of connected vehicles is driven by increasing customer and regulatory demands. To meet these, more complex software applications, some of which require service-based cloud and edge backends, are developed. Due to the short lifespan of software, it becomes necessary to keep these cloud environments and their applications up to date with security updates and new features. However, these changes can have extensive effects on the software architecture and communication paths, which can result in novel behavior of system components during runtime. Thus, after deployment it becomes harder to recognize whether deviations to the intended system behavior are occurring, ultimately resulting in higher monitoring efforts and slower responses to errors. As an approach to solve the proposed problem, this paper examines a simulation of the cloud environment in parallel with its operation. The simulation results should therefore serve as a reference for detecting unexpected deviations. As such, a concept is developed for mirroring the existing cloud system into a simulation. To collect the necessary data, an observability platform is presented to capture telemetry and architecture data. Subsequently, a simulation environment is designed that converts the architecture into a simulation model and simulates its dynamic workload by utilizing captured communication data. The proposed concept is evaluated in a real-world application scenario for electric vehicle charging: Vehicles can apply for an unoccupied charging station at a cloud service backend, the latter which manages all incoming requests and performs the assignment. Benchmarks are conducted by comparing the collected telemetry data with the simulated results under different loads and injected faults. The results show that regular cloud behavior is mirrored well by the simulation and that misbehavior due to fault injection is well visible, indicating that simulations are a promising data source for anomaly detection in connected vehicle cloud environments during operation.