Developing a Context-aware Architecture in DySCAS

• Software systems in vehicles are of rapidly increasing commercial importance for the automotive industry. Current vehicular embedded systems exhibit a fixed software structure and the possibilities for software upgrades are limited. Due to increasing expectations of context-awareness, dependability, flexibility, cost efficiency and time-to-market; we argue that it is now necessary to enable advanced features that are based on dynamic configuration.To reach the goals of dynamically self-configuring automotive systems, we propose an architecture which is currently being developed in the EC funded DySCAS project. We describe the proposed architecture, with a focus on its support for adaptive behavior. To illustrate the type and extent of adaptability achievable, a set of generic use case classes are briefly described and the requirements they place on the architecture and in particular the adaptive aspects, are discussed.The architecture is based on a distributed hierarchical control and decision strategy, which through the policy-based middleware functions and underlying technologies allows separation-of-concerns, on-line reconfiguration, seamless connectivity, plug-and-play capability, and also increased dependability and resource optimization. Decision points are concerned with both application and resource aspects and are dispersed throughout a distributed platform, allowing the embedding of numerous policies to make context-aware decisions whilst avoiding excessive complexity. The approach is scalable and provides additional freedom for engineers to define the dynamic configuration characteristics.The developed architecture is so far on a functional level and has been validated against system requirements. Current work concentrates on defining the corresponding software architecture, considering automotive platforms and constraints.

Ämnesord

TEKNIK OCH TEKNOLOGIER  -- Elektroteknik och elektronik -- Inbäddad systemteknik (hsv//swe)

ENGINEERING AND TECHNOLOGY  -- Electrical Engineering, Electronic Engineering, Information Engineering -- Embedded Systems (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

software architecture

autonomic computing

self-management

self-adaptive

middleware

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

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