Data-Centric Communication and Containerization for Future Automotive Software Architectures

Context: The functional interconnection and data routing in today's automotive electric/electronic architectures has reached a level of complexity which is hardly manageable and error-prone. This circumstance severely hinders short times from development to operation. Aim: The purpose of the study is to evaluate the feasibility of Data Distribution Services in accord with containerization technologies in an agile development process for automotive software. Method: We propose to represent services by means of topics in a data-centric publish-subscribe approach. We conduct performance benchmarks to evaluate its aptitude and present a case study illustrating fail-operational behavior in a setup recreated from highly automated driving. Results: Backed by the results and the case study we show that containerized services, along with data-centric messaging, manage to meet most of our proposed requirements. We furthermore reveal limitations of the used technology stack and discuss remedies to their shortcomings.