An Investigation of the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform from an Industry Perspective

Paper in proceeding, 2026

Context: The reliance on software as a distinguishing factor in the automotive industry is increasing. With a combined reliance on vendor-supplied software and cost-effective implementation, the AUTOSAR consortium was initialized to provide standardized platform specifications that enable re-use. Specifically, the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform (AP) specification aims to provide a high-performance service-oriented architecture. Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate what pain-points emerge when developing AUTOSAR Adaptive applications and whether they originate from the platform specification, its vendor-implementation, or its local usage.
Methods: We conduct a Design Science Research study, developing a minimal AP that serves as an experimental prototype for our investigation.
Results: We find that a combination of specification-inherent, implementation-based, and local practices contributes to the emergence of pain-points.
Conclusions: We conclude that there are AUTOSAR specification-inherent reasons for pain-points, resulting from architectural choices and re-use goals. The implication for development organizations is the need to mitigate these effects through tooling that better supports configuration file management and reduces developer training time to properly understand the adaptive application runtime life-cycle.