Extensibility-driven automotive in-vehicle architecture design

Increasingly more software-based applications are being developed and deployed in modern vehicles. As a result, the extensibility of a system design has become an important issue in order to accommodate more future applications and update of existing ones on one hand and reduce the effort and cost of re-design, test and validation on the other. In this paper, we discuss the extensibility-driven design in the automotive E/E architecture. We explain the motivation for such a design objective and discuss the definition of extensibility metric and extensibility-driven design methods under two different setting, namely the system based on CAN bus and FlexRay bus. Based on these two examples, we illustrate the importance and advantages of extensibility-driven design in the automotive E/E architecture.