Distributed Integration of Electronic Control Units for Automotive OEMs: Challenges, Vision, and Research Directions

To date, the development of automotive electronic control units (ECUs) has been a product of outsourcing arrangements among the OEM and their suppliers. Following each external supplier’s contribution, prototype versions of ECUs are eventually shipped to the automotive OEM for in-house integration testing. Should any device behave incorrectly, it must be successively returned to the corresponding supplier for an update. This introduces time delays in development and adds to the problem of late-development errors. In this paper, we describe challenges, our vision, and research directions for a framework that enables remote ECU integration among automotive OEM and suppliers whose locations are geographically distributed. We, furthermore, investigate aspects of the framework, identify research gaps, and outline future contributions.