Service Oriented Architecture as the foundation for automotive software development

For over 50 years, ECUs have been used to enhance the performance of the vehicle’s powertrain, steering, brakes, and more. Many cars today have up to 150 ECUs with their software comprising up to 35% of a vehicle’s value. With a modern vehicle on average containing 100 million lines of code spread across nearly 150 ECUs on 7 customized networks, traditional computing systems are stretched to their limits. All of this complexity comes at a high cost: software issues and the rising complexity of managing such, require the recall of millions of vehicles annually and cost the car industry over $17 billion.

Today’s ECU designs are legacy burdened and are not modular enough to enable quick software updates (or over-the-air updating capabilities) to give consumers the personalization and customization they crave. Additionally, cyber protection is inherently needed during all phases of design and OEMs and Tier 1s are struggling to integrate the hardware and software needed for delivering the advanced features and functionality that will define the next generation of in-vehicle experience.

The automotive industry must transition to modular hardware and software components, decoupling software from hardware, I/O from compute and software components from each other, rather than the current monolithic approach to HW and SW development. The only way is to implement the needed level of flexibility is to employ a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) framework to enable High Performance Computers (HPCs), Domain Controllers, or Gateways to serve as modular, flexible and consolidated computing platforms in the software defined car – and therefore empowering auto makers with the freedom to evolve.

The goal of the GuardKnox SOA Framework is to provide a unified SOA management framework for the automatic deployment, management, interconnection, and intercommunication of distributed software in ECUs. The SOA Framework facilitates the development of ECU’s software with the additional goals of maximizing software application portability, reusability, modularity and scalability through the use of standardized protocols and solutions, and an open architecture.

Although there are many definitions and architectural approaches for SOA implementation, it is in essence an architecture with dynamically deployed distributed applications that expose services. In this sense, applications can be developed by different vendors providing services used by other applications within the scope of the SOA and outside of it, without the vendors and/or the system integrator having to invest integration efforts. This will essentially shorten the application and service development cycle from months to weeks, and radically reduce the costs of deploying capabilities in the field.

GuardKnox is a world leader in Automotive Software-Oriented Architecture with a unique SOA middleware stack which is interoperable with industry standard hypervisors and OSes including AUTOSAR stacks.