Automotive Software Engineering in an increasingly Data-Driven Automotive Sector

Kurzfassung

Automotive trends such as power-train electrification, personalization, connectivity, and automated driving are not well supported by the classical approach to hardware/software architectures that centre around numerous, dedicated electronic control units (ECUs) where software is delivered as part of the ECU and it and its environment does not change much after vehicle assembly. Similarly, current electronic architectures and vehicles do not exploit data-driven software development practices and do not have the capability to make use of unprecedented amounts of data on the vehicle, but also its environment and the Internet. These trends ask for a data-driven approach where the development, production, and operation data of automotive software feed back into continuous correction, improvement, and personalization. In this paper, we report findings from the Transformation Hub Automotive Software Engineering (TASTE) with two years of intensive discussions and workshops with a wide range of companies regarding the challenges facing the German based automotive industry in general, as well as individual companies from Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM) to different suppliers (TIER-n). We discuss how previously different approaches need to be integrated into new software-centred development, update and maintenance processes throughout the automotive software value chains.