Deterministic and Reliable Software-Defined Vehicles: key building blocks, challenges, and vision

2024-07-24

AI Summary

Developing ultra-large-scale software (>10⁹ lines of code) for Level 5 autonomous vehicles faces critical challenges in ensuring end-to-end determinism, cross-domain real-time performance, high reliability, and formal verifiability. Method: This paper proposes a deterministic Software-Defined Vehicle (SDV) paradigm. It introduces a novel in-vehicle system architecture integrating service-oriented design, virtualization, and deterministic communication. A five-dimensional vertical architecture is established—comprising a deterministic network configurator, data-layer configurator, hypervisor configurator, Vehicle Abstraction Layer (VAL), and lightweight software orchestrator—uniquely unifying SOA, real-time virtualization, Time-Sensitive Networking (TSN), deterministic communication protocols, and VAL. Contribution/Results: The framework delivers end-to-end determinism, significantly improves development efficiency, and enhances formal verifiability. It provides a scalable, configurable, and formally verifiable engineering foundation for automotive software exceeding one million lines of code.

Technology Category

• Planning, Routing, and Scheduling: Deterministic Planning
• Application Domains: Software Engineering
• Computer Vision: Large Vision Models

Application Category

• Systems and Infrastructure for Web, Mobile and WoT: Virtualization and resource management in Web systems and infrastructures
• Search and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Vertical and domain-specific search
• Responsible Web: Machine-in-the-loop, human agency and autonomy

Abstract

As vehicle systems become increasingly complex, with more features, services, sensors, actuators, and processing units, it is important to view vehicles not just as modes of transportation moving toward full autonomy, but also as adaptive systems that respond to the needs of their occupants. Vehicular services can be developed to support these adaptations. However, the increasing complexity of vehicular service development, even with current standardizations, best practices and guidelines, are insufficient to tackle the high complexity of development, with expectations of up to 1 (U.S.) billion lines of code for a fully (level 5) autonomous vehicle. Within this survey, the paradigm of Deterministic Software Defined Vehicles is explored, aiming to enhance the quality and ease of developing automotive services by focusing on service-oriented architectures, virtualization techniques, and the necessary deterministic intra- and inter-vehicular communications. Considering the main open challenges for such verticals, a vision architecture towards improved services development and orchestration is presented, focusing on: a) a deterministic network configurator; b) a data layer configurator; c) a hypervisor configurator; d) the vehicle abstraction layer; and e) a software orchestrator.

Problem

• Complexity of Vehicle Services
• Autonomous Driving
• Software Management in Vehicles

Innovation

• Deterministic Software-Defined Vehicle
• Virtualization Technology
• Service-Oriented Architecture