Automatic Platform Configuration and Software Integration for Software-Defined Vehicles
Fengjunjie Pan, Jianjie Lin, Markus Rickert
TL;DR
The paper addresses the bottleneck of manual, design-time software integration in software-defined vehicles by shifting integration to runtime. It proposes an integration manager that combines model-based design space exploration with hardware and OS-level virtualization to automatically generate and execute deployment plans via a REST API, at both online (runtime) and offline (design-time) scales. Key contributions include the MBSE-driven planning workflow, EMF2SMT-based optimization, automated code generation, and a PoC on a simulated SDV platform using ACRN, K3S, and Terraform to demonstrate runtime reconfiguration. The work suggests that such automation can shorten development cycles and enable flexible, safe configurations across diverse SDV architectures.
Abstract
In the automotive industry, platform configuration and software integration are mostly manual tasks performed during the development phase, requiring consideration of various safety and non-safety requirements. This manual process often leads to prolonged development cycles and provides limited flexibility. This paper introduces a novel approach to automate platform configuration and software integration for software-defined vehicles (SDVs), shifting these activities from the development phase to runtime. Our approach features an integration manager that combines model-based methods and virtualization technologies to generate and execute deployment plans. By leveraging model-based systems engineering (MBSE), our method automatically generates platform configuration and software integration plans, which are then converted into deployment-ready formats using code generation techniques. Utilizing virtualization and container orchestration technologies, the proposed system enables dynamic and flexible resource allocation while ensuring compliance with safety requirements. Communication between the development and runtime platforms is facilitated via a REST API. A proof of concept was implemented on a simulated SDV platform with the Intel Whiskey Lake Board. This demonstration showcases the integration manager on an SDV with a central computer, highlighting the potential to shorten development cycles and adapt to diverse vehicle configurations.