Time-bounded Adaptation for Automotive System Software

Software is increasingly deployed in vehicles as demand for new functionality increases and cheaper and more powerful hardware becomes available. Likewise, emerging wireless communication protocols allow the integration of new software into vehicles, thereby enabling time-bounded adaptive response to changes that occur in mobile environments. Examples of time-bounded adaptation include adaptive cruise control and the dynamic integration of location-aware services within fixed time bounds. This paper provides three contributions to the study of time-bounded adaptation for automotive system software. First, we categorise automotive systems with respect to requirements for dynamic software adaptation. Second, we define a taxonomy that captures various dimensions of dynamic adaptation in emerging automotive system software. Third, we use this taxonomy to analyse existing research projects in the automotive domain. Our analysis shows that although time-bounded synchronisation of applications and data is a key requirement for next-generation automotive systems, it is not adequately covered by existing work.