¬ Driven by the advent of innovative vehicle applications, contemporary automotive E/E architecture has reached a level of complexity which requires a technological breakthrough in order to manage it satisfactorily and fulfill the heightened passenger and legal requirements. This need is particularly acute for high-end, luxury vehicle manufacturers and their leading Tier 1 suppliers who are faced with often conflicting requirements from
- legal enforcement - key items include environmental aspects and safety requirements
- passenger convenience and service requirements from the comfort and entertainment functional domains
- driver assistance and dynamic drive aspects - key items include detection and suppression of critical dynamic vehicle states and navigation in high density traffic surroundings
¬ Leading OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, having recognized this to be an industry-wide challenge, decided to work together to address it. Their common objective is to create a basis for industry collaboration on basic functions while providing a platform which continues to encourage competition on innovative functions.
To this end a development partnership called Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) has been formed with the goals of
- Implementation and standardization of basic system functions as an OEM wide "Standard Core" solution
- Scalability to different vehicle and platform variants
- Transferability of functions throughout network
- Integration of functional modules from multiple suppliers
- Consideration of availability and safety requirements
- Redundancy activation
- Maintainability throughout the whole "Product Life Cycle"
- Increased use of "Commercial off the shelf hardware"
- Software updates and upgrades over vehicle lifetime
The AUTOSAR scope includes all vehicle domains.
The AUTOSAR standard will serve as a platform upon which future vehicle applications will be implemented and will also serve to minimize the current barriers between functional domains. It will, therefore, be possible to map functions and functional networks to different control nodes in the system, almost independently from the associated hardware.
