Ontology for Vehicle Function Distribution

Distributing software onto the different controllers of a vehicle has become an increasingly difficult task for architects, as the number of functions to be experienced by the driver or passengers of a car is growing. At the same time, there are research and industrial efforts in breaking the inflexibility of vehicle software architectures after their manufacturing, e.g. by introducing over-the-air updates. However, the nomenclature of distributing software was found to be ambiguous. As a prerequisite for future research, we introduce an ontology that defines a frame of reference for the static as well as the dynamic function distribution and a simplified view on the software and hardware architectures necessary for the definition.