Rethink EE Architecture in Automotive to facilitate Automation,

Paper in proceeding, 2018

Nowadays software and electronics play a fundamental role for

commercial vehicles in order for a driver to manually operate

them effectively and safely in different transport applications.

Although the overall design thinking in the commercial vehicle

industry is still very much oriented towards a geometric

perspective and thus physical modules, which for software means

binaries related to physical electronic boxes. Furthermore, there

are many incentives for a higher degree of automation for

commercial vehicles to gain productivity, while at the same time

facing very different demands on final transport applications. In

addition, the environmental impact drives the need to reduce the

fossil fuel usage by introducing electrified propulsion torque,

which could be distributed over several vehicle units. In order to

manage this variety of final applications a product line oriented

approach is used that will also be challenged by the need to

support a feature range from manual to fully automated vehicles

and alternative powertrains, possibly distributed torque supply and

electrification of many things. In order to deal with different

transport applications; wide feature range; and a transition from

traditionally closed embedded systems towards interconnected

machines and systems there is a need to shift the traditional ECUoriented

mindset. In this paper a supplementary perspective is

added to the traditional geometry-oriented perspective – a

functionality perspective, which facilitates reasoning about

functionality and thus application software. The paper proposes a

reference architecture that is based on horizontal and vertical

layering of functionality.