38 PART | I ITS technology enablers
European OEMs and is gaining in popularity in the United States, Japan, and
Korea. AUTOSAR provides guidelines for the development of in-car network
and communication infrastructure, defines the necessary exchange formats, and
specifies an OS infrastructure for deeply embedded ECUs (AUTOSAR Classic
Platform) and performance ECUs (AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform).
According to AUTOSAR, a fully compliant software environment and devel-
opment kit for the automotive scenario must provide the following functionality:
The AUTOSAR Classic Platform defines the required capabilities for real-
time processing and safety. The ECUs that use this Classic Platform are already
deployed in ASIL-D environments. The Classic Platform together with other
software parts can provide functionality that requires response times in the
lower microseconds domain and safety monitoring capabilities in the perfor-
mance domain.
The AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform, which is still under development, is
expected to extend the classic platform and become an automotive standard
for high-performance ECUs. Using the same service-oriented network proto-
cols as the Classic platform, the adaptive platform achieves inter-operability
and backward compatibility. It also is based on a service-oriented middleware
and provides system health monitoring capabilities for checking the perfor-
mance of ECUs, and all are available to run on POSIX PSE51 compatible
OSs. Furthermore, a new standard interface that is planned to be based on the
OpenCL standard from Khronos group, is defined for accessing the hardware
accelerator units, thus adding to the extensibility of the platform.
The hypervisor serves a common requirement for performance ECUs that
is the separation of the different software domains and processes. The use of
hypervisors allows increased security and safety since it provides:
• An environment where separate software processes with varying criticalities
and different ASIL can be executed.
• Secure communication with the system backend and the internet and en-
hances the overall security.
Since the hypervisor has full control on apps and processes, it is easy to
redirect unknown or untrusted processes to virtual machines and demanding
processes to separate and specialized operating systems and software stacks.
The Linux-based OS environment offers better compatibility with a wide
range of software solutions, with emphasis on the HPC software and perfor-
mance ECU software. The AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform is also available on
Linux, thus providing more links to the Linux-based software.
The use of an SDK and interoperable data formats is expected to accelerate
the software development process for the eHCP platform. AUTOSAR ARXML
is the standard format for information exchange between ECUs, which is mainly
based on the use of self-describing software services and components that allow
to modularize the system and manage its complexity. This is very important for
the near future applications that will redefine the term “system,” from a single