Dynamic Reconfiguration of Automotive Architectures Using a Novel Plug-and-Play Approach

Innovation cycles in the automotive industry are shortening due to influences from the IT world and trends such as automated driving. In contrast, the life cycles of the vehicles remain substantially longer. This gives rise to problems such as the lack of availability of essential components. In addition, new business cases are emerging, such as retrofitting functionality at the customer’s site. However, the electrical/electronical and software architectures of today’s vehicles do not offer the required degree of flexibility during runtime.This paper therefore presents a plug-and-play approach to dynamically reconfigure vehicle architectures. This includes the registration of new components such as ECUs or intelligent sensors/actuators in the vehicle, including the transfer of required software components to the vehicle’s software repository. The focus here is on the exchange of components based on socalled capabilities: As a consequence, it is not only possible to dynamically switch to another capability in the event of a failure, but also when a capability with higher-rated properties becomes available after adding new components. This approach is demonstrated using two cameras that are switched between at runtime. Our findings indicate that feasible switching times can be achieved and that the approach is therefore suitable for productive use.