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Phoenix — Too Young

I attended the workshop on Software Engineering Challenges for Ubiquitous Computing (SEUC 2006) in Lancaster, presided over by Gerd Kortuem.

After a somewhat hurried paper submission about using AOP in automotive software, I decided to change tack, so my presentation was about what kind of problems software engineers in the automotive space are facing. Admittedly I wasn’t presenting any answers, but my presentation went well and, being the only presenter discussing automotive systems and autonomics explicitly, I got a number of interesting questions which created a good discussion.

[PPT] Software Considerations for Automotive Pervasive Systems Talk given at SEUC2006, June 1–2, Lancaster UK.

Here’s an excerpt from my talk:

The modern car is a highly sensorial, complex pervasive system, with thousands of sensors and actuators and hundreds of microcontrollers controlling almost all aspects of the car’s operation; from the multimedia & entertainment systems (radio, DVD players) and navigation/mapping software, to communication both to the outside world and also on a more limited scale to other cars nearby on the road.

A spidogram of automotive software split into modules.

Finally, and most importantly, are the car’s safety systems. Most of the impetus for adding so much software to cars is the supposed benefits to driver safety. And when it works, this is great, but we must also recognise that the stakes are higher. There are dangers involved that most pervasive systems don’t have to be concerned with.

System Personalisation

Much of the talk and discussion involved the implications of personalisation in automotive systems. In the future and to an extent even now, you can choose which features you want your car to come shipped with. This is likely to increase in scale over time, so that a car’s base configuration can be permuted in thousands of ways for each buyer. Modules need to be unobtrusively integrated and interoperable.

Layered on top of this is the possibility of a car being modified, upgraded or damaged over time. Cars will have to be able to adapt to whatever components they have installed, and thus, there is a lot of autonomic computing involved.

Questions & Answers

A few brief (paraphrased) questions and answers that I remembered to write down (not guaranteed to be correct!):

Will hardware and software become increasingly decoupled in automotive systems?
This doesn’t seem to be the way it’s going. As far as I can see (and this was backed up at the workshop), the hardware and software systems seem to be getting more tightly coupled if anything.
What is the development process at the car OEMs?
I couldn’t answer this, but someone else stepped in and suggested that a lot of OEM’s in-house teams are actually graviating towards being software-only development houses, with hardware being contracted out to other companies.
Does the drive-by-wire filtering of a user’s input spoil the love of driving?
Not really a research question, but interesting nonetheless. I do wonder how many drivers could honestly say they’d prefer the primal thrill of risky, unrestricted driving over the increased safety and stability benefits of these modern cars.

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