Production-Optimized Automotive Software Architecture: Theory and Applications

The automotive software architecture is struggling with production stability and efficiency, as frequent and regular software updates incur side effects on software-related processes in the end assembly. To close the gap, this article refines and formalizes the concept of production-oriented software partitioning (POSP), a novel architecture for in-car software which physically decouples software used within production from production-irrelevant software. Experimental evaluation using a developed prototype confirms the feasibility of the proposed architecture. The prototype further showcases the potential of POSP, achieving a 16% reduction in software size for production use. Moreover, the article contributes a generic model for analyzing automotive software systems at the software component level, a formal workflow for refactoring legacy systems toward POSP, and a redundancy-based method for partitioning software systems following the generic model. These contributions are demonstrated on an industry-grade AUTOSAR Classic platform, highlighting the potential of production-oriented software partitioning (POSP) for short-term industrial adoption and enhanced stability and efficiency in large-scale automotive production.