There are many incentives for a higher degree of automation for commercial vehicles to gain productivity, while at the same time facing very different demands on final transport applications. In addition, the environmental impact drives the need to reduce fossil fuel usage by introducing electrified torque generation, which could be distributed over several vehicle units in a vehicle combination. Electronics and especially software play a fundamental role for commercial vehicles in order to achieve energy/power balancing, assist a driver to manually operate vehicles effectively in combination with various degrees of automation and doing that dependable in different transport applications. Although the overall design thinking in the commercial vehicle industry is still very much oriented towards a geometric perspective and thus physical modules, which for software means binaries related to physical electronic boxes (ECUs) - classical ECU-oriented mindset. In this paper a supplementary perspective is added to the traditional geometry-oriented perspective - a functionality perspective, which facilitates reasoning about functionality and thus application software. The paper proposes a reference architecture that is based on four horizontal and two vertical layering of functionality.
展开▼
