Platform-Independent QoS Parameters and Primitive APIs for Automotive Software

Modern ITS (Intelligent Transportation System) applications are becoming increasingly sophisticated and diverse, following the growing trends of connectivity and autonomous driving. For example, a vehicle can be equipped with advanced sensors (e.g., LIDAR, camera or radar) to perform complex driving maneuvers by itself and/or communicate with other vehicles or road-side infrastructures to assist drivers in safer driving. Since the operation of an automotive application is closely tied to the underlying platform characteristics, it requires significant integration effort when the application needs to operate on a wide range of platforms such as other vehicle types or road-side infrastructures. To reduce such effort, we propose a method to implement automotive applications in a platform-independent way. Our approach is to define the automotive domain-specific QoS (Quality of Service) parameters that allow an application to specify the expected quality of sensor input or actuator output independent of a particular platform for safe operation. The application interacts with a platform through several primitive APIs to inform QoS requirements, to read/write sensors/actuators values according to the specified QoS, and to handle exceptions upon any QoS violation. We implement a multi-mode ACC (Adaptive Cruise Control) application on a RC-car platform to demonstrate how an automotive application can be implemented based on the proposed QoS parameters and primitives.