Rethink EE Architecture in Automotive to Facilitate Automation, Connectivity, and Electro Mobility

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 ECU-oriented 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.