Automotive Industry: towards SOA Software Architecture Software definition car becomes a reality

Moving towards the SOA automotive software architecture and promoting the software-defined vehicle to become a reality "software-defined vehicle" has become an industry consensus, and with Tesla taking the lead in landing the business model of "hardware as the traffic entrance and software as the charging service", it has brought a significant catfish effect. Many traditional vehicle manufacturers are setting up subsidiaries (Volvo, Toyota, SAIC, Changan, FAW, etc.), setting up software research and development departments (Great Wall, Volkswagen, Renault Nissan, etc.), and cooperating with software suppliers (Guangzhou Automobile, Geely, BMW, etc.). In order to truly realize software-defined automobile and software-driven innovation, from a technical point of view, automotive software architecture is moving from "signal-oriented" to "service-oriented (SOA)". The essence of SOA architecture is to modularize and standardize the original scattered ECU and its corresponding basic software functions, decouple each application area and redeploy into a hierarchical software architecture, so that the car can quickly respond to the needs of consumers, add or update various functions, and finally achieve thousands of people.

To split the software architecture, the system and functional software play an important role in the short term. In the long run, the application layer software architecture is becoming more layered and modular, so that the application layer functions can be reused on different models, hardware platforms and operating systems. And the application functions can be iteratively upgraded quickly through standardized interfaces. Furthermore, the software architecture can be divided into three parts: system software (virtual machine, system kernel, middleware), functional software and application layer. In the short term, the virtual machine technology, system kernel and middleware and other system software will be very important if you want to really land the SOA software architecture in the automobile, but because of the technical difficulty and security requirements of its development, the overall competition pattern has become stable; in the long run, after the construction of SOA architecture is mature, rich applications will be the focus of differentiation competition of various automobile brands, with more value space. At the same time, with the improvement of the complexity of cloud software, vehicle network information security will gradually become the main battlefield of future applications.

In the era of software-defined automobile, multi-power competition for operating system is the core of automobile software architecture. We define the operating system type from the technical point of view and the product point of view. From a technical point of view, it can be divided into real-time operating system (often used in the field of vehicle control, with high security and reliability) and non-real-time operating system (often used in the field of cockpit entertainment, paying more attention to compatibility and development ecology). From the product point of view, it can be divided into facing the whole car factory and facing the consumer.

Among them, the operating system for the whole vehicle factory is mostly used for secondary development, and used in areas where consumers can not directly interact with each other. The consumer-oriented operating system, which aims at market production and testing standards, has a certain brand premium. Most manufacturers are based on Linux kernel cutting and configuration, and then add their own design of UI. On the whole, the above two definitions of on-board operating system cross each other, the real-time operating system for the whole vehicle factory includes QNX, RT-Linux, VxWorks and so on, and the non-real-time operating system for the whole vehicle factory is mainly AGL, Android and so on. Consumer-oriented real-time operating systems include Tesla Version, Baidu Apollo, Huawei Hongmeng OS, etc., while consumer-oriented non-real-time operating systems include Tencent TAI, AliAliOS and so on.