Integrated Approach for High-quality Software Development of Upgradeable Vehicles

The automotive industry’s pursuit of customization poses safety challenges for future vehicles due to the limitations of current development practices. Although updating existing driving functions over the air is already possible, the large number of vehicle variants and installed hardware components prevents manufacturers from upgrading existing vehicles and integrating new driving functions and enhancements. This paper presents an integrated approach for high-quality software development of upgradeable vehicles to increase the reliability and safety of updates. Our approach transfers current software product line development methods to the system generation engineering of vehicles to enable predictive development and expansion of software-defined driving functions, considering hardware adaptations based on expected changes in product profiles. We define a variability modelling concept that maps hardware and software components to their respective inter-dependencies, considering the system’s variability in space (i.e. system variants) and time (i.e. system versions). We also present a plug-and-play mechanism to integrate software and intelligent hardware components into the vehicle after production without expensive reconfiguration. To this end, we enhance the concept with intelligent sensor software that can extend the functionality of existing hardware sensors to minimize the need for hardware extensions. An effective and automated test method to verify many software versions and variants completes our integrated development approach.