A Comprehensive Survey on Software as a Service (SaaS) Transformation for the Automotive Systems

Over the last few decades, automotive embedded Information and Communication Technology (ICT) systems have been used to enhance vehicle performance and enrich peopleâ’s driving experience, increasing the panel of software features within them. However, even though until now automakers have kept up with the innovation pace in terms of the functionalities that have been offered to passengers, the majority of automakers’ efforts have concentrated on bringing in these new functionalities by adding an unceasingly larger set of ECUs. All of this has been done without evolving any of the embedded software architecture consequently, due to budgetary constraints, legislative limitations, retro-compatibility problems, and a lack of awareness of the trending IT innovation. This unbalanced progress has then led to a substantial increase in in-vehicle architectural complexity, which has become a major concern for automakers nowadays as it makes the vehicle repairing process more complex, decreases software traceability and clashes with the objective of having higher business flexibility, modularity, and dynamicity within the vehicles. In this paper, we are going to go through literature, both academic and industrial, and propose a comprehensive study into automotive system transformation. We begin by giving a detailed analysis of the causes of evolution under five axes - i.e., society, business, industry, application, and technical. Then, we discuss the convergence of cars and software life cycles and propose a three-layered analysis of automotive ICT systems consisting of architecture design, software pipelines, and run-time management. Finally, we are going to propose certain detailed guidelines on the evolution perspectives for automotive systems through deriving from the convergence of advances in IT, as well as current and future automotive environmental constraints.