An Android-based automotive middleware architecture for plug-and-play of applications

Modern vehicles are getting increasingly smarter and evolving to become new mobile computing platforms. As the software platformization of vehicles advances, the demands for reconfigurable cars, installing and upgrading vehicle software as plug-and-play have also grown. However, the existing automotive software platforms are not designed for dynamic reconfiguration and plug-and-play. This paper addresses the plug-and-play challenge in the recent automotive systems. Drawing from recent advancements in the mobile phone operating systems, we propose an Android-based software architecture which supports the play-and-play in automotive systems. In our architecture, an application can be downloaded from cloud services and executed on ECUs in a distributed fashion. Before installing an application, our system performs schedulability analysis to check real-time performance requirements for recent vehicles. We also present a model-based development tool for designing a workflow of automotive applications for our system. We implement a prototype and demonstrate the feasibility of our approach.