An Empirical Study on the Current and Future Challenges of Automotive Software Release and Configuration Management

摘要

Current automotive trends, such as autonomous and connected driving, are mainly enabled by embedded software that is deployed on a network of several, often more than one hundred, electronic control units. These software parts are responsible for many complex tasks concerning safety, comfort, energy management, and vehicle dynamics. Currently, they are deployed to the units at the end of the assembly line. Although a new software baseline of electronic control units is released in regular terms, normally six months, updates during after-sales are mostly conducted only in urgent cases, such as recall campaigns. Upcoming over-the-air services will enable more frequent updates to fix bugs and add new functionality. The possible alternatives of engines, chassis, and customer wishes lead to a high number of existing vehicle variants, so that the management of releases and configurations becomes more complex and costly. In a survey, we asked participants from different automotive institutions about the current state of practice, and the challenges they face during release development and management. This paper presents and discusses the main results of this survey: We have identified that field updates will be deployed more frequently in the future, and that over-the-air communication is an efficient way to realize them. The reported main update reasons are bug fixes and function improvement. However, the shortening release and update cycles, the increasing number of variants, and the multidisciplinarity in the automotive field are major challenges requiring suitable processes, methods, and tools to achieve software that operates correctly.