AUTOSAR: the Need for Autonomic Enhancements Josu Martinez Systems Research Group School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin IE +3531765356 josu.martinez@ucd.ie Simon Dobson Systems Research Group School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin IE +3531765360 simon.dobson@ucd.ie Paddy Nixon Systems Research Group School of Computer Science and Informatics UCD Dublin IE +3531762919 paddy.nixon@ucd.ie ABSTRACT The focus of automotive systems design increasingly in- volves complex and evolving software requirements. Current and projected standardization efforts still require significant manual configuration and management of software deploy- ments in the face of changing components and other issues with the software product line. This paper suggests that techniques from autonomic computing, specially related to agency-based and adaptive middleware, may make a signif- icant contribution to the long-term maintainability of auto- motive software and cope with the emerging challenges in the vehicle industry. Categories and Subject Descriptors C.0 [Computer Systems Organization]: General; C.4 [Performance of Systems]: Design Studies, Fault Tol- erance, Modeling Techniques, Performance Attributes, and Reliability, Availability and Serviceability; I.2.11 [Distributed Artificial Intelligence]: Intelligent Agents and Multiagent Systems General Terms Performance, Design, Reliability, Standardization, Theory Keywords AUTOSAR, Autonomic Computing, Adaptive Middleware, Multiagent Systems, Unity, DySCAS 1. INTRODUCTION Some short-term expectations [18] suggest that electronics systems, which account for more than 20% of the cost of a car today, will increase to 30% by 2008 (Strategy Analytics), and also that more than 40% of the total value of automotive electronics will be in the software by 2010 (Mercer Manage- ment Consulting). This increase is produced both by the insertion of new components in the ECUs and the inclu- sion of Consumer Electronic (CE) devices, which represent Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. To copy otherwise, to republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. WOODSTOCK ’97 El Paso, Texas USA Copyright 200X ACM X-XXXXX-XX-X/XX/XX ...$5.00. the next step in the evolution of the automotive electronic systems. As in many sectors of the industry, the different vehicle manufacturers (OEMs) and suppliers that compose the au- tomotive sector have been developing their proprietary solu- tions to try to cope with every new challenge generated by novel functionalities expected by the end consumers. These functionalities, which are translated into software compo- nents and later embedded into Electronic Control Units (ECUs), enhance the operation of certain parts of the ve- hicle, such as driving assistance, car dynamics or the airbag control system. So far top manufacturers decide how the automotive system is designed, enforcing hardware and soft- ware suppliers to follow their imposed rules when imple- menting new software products. However, the automotive sector is experiencing a tremen- dous increase in the functional scope of electronic devices, not only to handle all the new functionalities demanded by the market but also to contribute in the vehicle management complexity reduction. This huge hardware and software het- erogeneity arising in the automotive sector is raising the cost and risks of development and integration of new and often more complex components in proprietary products, as they typically offer non-transferable specialized and fixed func- tionality, constituting a closed environment. Consequently, the inclusion and upgrades of software modules are difficult and expensive, making the traditional models and develop- ment processes became obsolete. AUTOSAR (AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture) deals with the heterogeneity of the automotive components provided by OEMs and the different suppliers, establishing a de-facto open industry standard for automotive architec- tures [5]. The scope of the actual version of this applica- tion is mainly the control systems for mechanics (powertrain, chassis, active and passive safety, and body and comfort). It provides a layered infrastructure in order to abstract the business logic from the hardware, in which all the different components (differentiated in application software compo- nents and basic software components) can interact between them by just implementing some standard interfaces and data exchange formats. The anthem of AUTOSAR is to co- operate on standards and complete on implementation [16]. Standardization enhances the system scalability and inte- gration of components, which reduces the susceptibility to failure. It allows portability between the different vehicle and platform variants, transferability of functions between components, and reusability and updates of code. Moreover, it decreases the development cost, and boosts the system re-