Technical architectures for automotive systems

Paper in proceeding, 2020

Driven by software, the automotive domain is living an unprecedented revolution with original equipment manufacturers increasingly becoming software companies. Vehicle electrical and electronic software architectures are considered means for addressing several concerns, which span from safety to security, through electrification and autonomy. Such architectures serve also as pivotal means for enabling communication between an original equipment manufacturer and suppliers (tier 1 and 2 companies) within the automotive ecosystem. In the automotive domain, software architectures include (at least) three different views of descending abstraction: functional, logical, and technical. In this work, we focus on the technical view with a two-folded contribution. On the one hand, we propose a feature model of technical architectures for automotive systems. On the other hand, starting from the elicited feature model, we present three technical reference architectures able to guide three generations of automotive systems. We evaluate the contribution of this work by means of a focus group validation session and short semi-structured interviews with automotive experts and practitioners.