The technological advancements of recent years have steadily increased the complexity of vehicle-internal software systems, and the ongoing development towards autonomous driving will further aggravate this situation. This is leading to a level of complexity that is pushing the limits of existing vehicle software architectures and system designs. By changing the software structure to a service-based architecture, companies in other domains successfully managed the rising complexity and created a more agile and future-oriented development process. This paper presents a case-study investigating the feasibility and possible effects of changing the software architecture for a complex driver assistance function to a microservice architecture. The complete procedure is described, starting with the description of the software-environment and the corresponding requirements, followed by the implementation, and the final testing. In addition, this paper provides a high-level evaluation of the microservice architecture for the automotive use-case. The results show that microservice architectures can reduce complexity and time-consuming process steps and makes the automotive software systems prepared for upcoming challenges as long as the principles of microservice architectures are carefully followed.
Context: The functional interconnection and data routing in today's automotive electric electronic architectures has reached a level of complexity which is hardly manageable and error-prone. This circumstance severely hinders short times from development to operation. Aim: The purpose of the study is to evaluate the feasibility of Data Distribution Services in accord with containerization technologies in an agile development process for automotive software. Method: We propose to represent services by means of topics in a data-centric publish-subscribe approach. We conduct performance benchmarks to evaluate its aptitude and present a case study illustrating fail-operational behavior in a setup recreated from highly automated driving. Results: Backed by the results and the case study we show that containerized services, along with data-centric messaging, manage to meet most of our proposed requirements. We furthermore reveal limitations of the used technology stack and discuss remedies to their shortcomings.