On March 12, 2024, at the 5th Software-Defined Vehicle Forum 2024 and AUTOSAR China Day, Zheng Xinhang, CTO of ETAS China, said that from the perspective of software factories, the future of software vehicle development will lead to a series of major changes, which can be roughly divided into three core steps.
First of all, joint integration, that is, on the basis of maintaining the existing development system and tool chain, to achieve efficient cross-departmental and cross-supplier collaboration, with vehicle software products, automation integration and testing as the core goal. Secondly, the concept of joint assembly line is proposed to promote close collaboration across departments and suppliers. Finally, looking to the future, the vehicle development industry will focus more on collaborative development, perhaps even adopting a fully open source model. This integration of software factories and collaborative development will greatly enhance the synergy between software companies and vehicle development companies, and jointly promote the innovation and development of the entire industry.
Zheng Xinhang | Chief Technology Officer of ETAS China
The following is a summary of the speech:
The future of the car is defined by software
The biggest trend in the industry in recent years is software-defined vehicles, and from the perspective of end users, the biggest experience that software-defined vehicles bring to users in the industry is to bring users a more fresh car experience and various driving functions at the fastest speed.
Backed by Bosch, as a top international spare parts supplier, ETAS is more focused on empowering vehicle manufacturers and bringing higher efficiency to the general trend of software-defined vehicles. From the perspective of software-defined vehicles, what is the biggest impact on vehicle manufacturing enterprises? It is necessary to mention economies of scale, from the perspective of economics, the simplest definition of economies of scale is that with the increase in the number of products produced by an enterprise, after reaching a critical value, each new product is added, the corresponding unit cost will gradually decrease, that is to say, the larger the scale, the more economic effects will be bringed, and the profitability can be realized.
From the perspective of the world, the scale effect is the most extreme, and the scale effect of the software and Internet industry has been the largest in the past few decades, which is why the automotive industry has been talking about transforming from the software level. ETAS sees two major challenges in the field of consumer-facing vehicle design: one is to improve the overall delivery efficiency and speed up delivery. The second is how to face the integration risks caused by the increasing software complexity of software-defined vehicles in the future.
SDV Software Factory
The new approach and concept in the industry from the perspective of software-defined vehicles is DevOps, which is the integration of development and operation and maintenance. In 2008, people in the IT industry were the first to put forward this concept, its main concept and the software development process and the user's use process in the software industry in the past are relatively separated, after the Internet and the IT industry took off, under the same set of cloud computing platform, the software development environment and the operation and production environment are highly integrated. As vehicle software becomes more and more complex, it is inevitable that any OEM will need to closely integrate the actual experience of the end user with the development and delivery of new features and the repair of software product defects.
Source: ETAS
From the perspective of DevOps integration, ETAS can provide many functions to partners and customers in the industry. There are two main lines of workflow, one is the software perspective, that is, from the developer's point of view, the final generated code and the associated binary can be delivered to the customer's vehicle to take effect of the whole workflow. The other is from the perspective of the tool chain, we are for the automotive software terminal developer, he will use this complete set of tool processes, from requirements definition to code generation, to the final test and verification, these two workflow lines are ETAS currently in the field of software factory to empower partners and customers, on top of the whole big loop, we will focus on three angles. One is the tool, the second is the approach to automotive software development, and the third is to help customers and partners integrate IT infrastructure.
At present, the biggest challenge encountered in the vehicle software development process is that any vehicle development enterprise has no way to achieve full-stack self-development, and in the near future, it can be seen that the software supply system of the vehicle will become a very complex software supply chain network, and the biggest challenge of the corresponding traditional software development model is in the whole life cycle process of vehicle development, and the current parts suppliers are still in an isolated state of development, which will lead to the risk of software integration explosion in the mass production stage.
In addition, in the vehicle development stage, there will also be problems that have not been encountered in the industry in the past, such as customers want to continue to iterate on vehicle functions, through OTA can not only repair the defect repair after the new car is launched, but also include continuous iterative delivery of new functions, which envisages that OEMs need to provide some fresh functions to end consumers, and there will be cross-domain controller interaction, and the entire development process will enter a new round of cross-vendor cooperation, and finally enter the huge risk of integration explosion, bringing a lot of delivery risks and cost overruns。
From the perspective of software factory, ETAS believes that in the future, the software cross-vendor or the transformation system in the vehicle department will be divided into three main steps, the first step is joint integration, and the current development system and tool chain will basically remain unchanged to achieve cross-departmental and cross-supplier, with vehicle software products, automated integration, and automated testing as the primary goal. The second step is the joint assembly line, cross-departmental and cross-supplier collaboration for vehicle R&D projects, and the vehicle development enterprises will build a unified development platform to jointly carry out vehicle DevOps operations on it. The third step is to enter into a joint development system, and joint collaboration to achieve truly fast and transparent related collaboration.
From the perspective of vehicle development, the industry will promote more collaborative development, and even completely open source mode, so that all participants in the software supply chain network can have a high degree of transparency and mutual trust, and can provide an effective full-stack security collaboration platform mechanism for the project. Through software factories and collaborative development, the overall effect of cooperation between software companies and vehicle development enterprises can be greatly improved.
ETAS's solution
ETAS is backed by the Bosch Group, and when implementing the software factory concept within the group, we also recognized that change is not simply the introduction of tool chains and methodologies, but requires a complete set of collaborative mechanisms to provide partners and customers with consultative changes and a complete set of methodological support. In the industry, many customers and partners will think that ETAS is an embedded solution provider in the traditional segment, but in fact, we have also made very significant changes in the last two or three years, and we hope to work with OEMs, customers, and partners to jointly build through consulting, and at the same time provide training for business departments, especially R&D departments, and finally enter operation and maintenance.
At the same time, ETAS's product line is very long, from the initial software code generation to the factory, to the software validation, we can not only provide continuous product support and maintenance based on traditional products, but also provide customers with relevant solutions in engineering projects.
Source: ETAS
In order to help customers build an integrated R&D and development platform in the future, we help customers integrate the IT infrastructure of their existing development platforms on the basis of ensuring information security and functional safety, and at the same time help customers build collaboration platforms and collaboration pipelines. On this basis is the tradition of ETAS and the Bosch Group, which includes the creation of code, especially the automatic code generation for modeling like traditional AutoCAD.
Having talked about a lot of definitions of software factories, I would also like to mention some specific solutions that ETAS can provide in recent software factories. We believe that in the future, there will be a trend of cross-domain collaboration between various domains in the operating system of the car, and the future car can be divided into security and non-security domains from the domain. The safety domain refers to the one that is highly related to the functional safety of the vehicle, such as the traditional chassis powertrain, which has very high requirements and very high functional safety requirements. In the non-functional safety domain, the biggest pain point for experts who have worked in the field is cross-domain collaboration and cross-domain convergence. From how the consumer applications in the cockpit domain can safely and effectively mobilize various components of driving safety, although ETAS does not make a system itself, it will provide a large number of methods and related tools that can accelerate and automate the efficiency of middleware and program development in the whole vehicle.
At the same time, we also rely on the experience of traditional automotive software functional safety development, which can ensure that cross-domain software communication and related function mobilization meet the overall requirements of functional safety and related in-vehicle high efficiency and low load.
The next area is the concept of vehicle virtualization promoted by ETAS to the industry, and many friends have also mentioned the vehicle's software-in-the-loop and hardware-in-the-loop simulation in the past period, which greatly improves the efficiency of R&D. On this basis, ETAS also has professional and proven solutions in its niche areas, which can further promote collaborative development and large-scale cross-departmental collaboration with suppliers. The basic idea is that we hope that in the field of vehicle development, in the early stage of vehicle research and development, any single department can directly participate in the calibration test and verification process of the vehicle in the development of a new controller, and its concept will be provided by the vehicle manufacturer to provide a complete set of virtual vehicle cloud simulation platform.
In terms of technical construction, the concept of the whole platform requires a large number of collaborations from third-party suppliers, for example, we need controller manufacturers to be able to virtualize its controllers and automatically deploy them to the cloud simulation platform in a streamlined manner, and we also need suppliers of controlled object models and various simulation links to upload their controlled products including various actuators to the cloud, and finally the vehicle manufacturer provides a complete set of virtual vehicle platforms for cloud virtualization, which can provide on-demand test computing resources for various development and testing developers, and can greatly parallelize vehicle-level virtualized testing in the cloud。
Finally, ADAS middleware (EDMS), which is also a new solution that Bosch and ETAS have focused on promoting in the past one or two years, it can span pre-mass production and post-mass production, and at the same time integrate the three tools we just mentioned, the biggest feature is that it brings certainty to the algorithm and performance in the R&D stage above the L3 level of autonomous driving. With a low probability but a large number of editing and abnormal scenes, this kind of middleware and related technical support can ensure that we can accurately capture all kinds of abnormal scenarios under the actual road conditions, and at the same time can accurately reproduce them in the test platform and simulation platform with high fidelity one to one, which we call data decisive.
The examples just given are some of ETAS's new attempts in the field of software factory, which does not mean that ETAS will be limited to these three areas in the future, and our ultimate mission is to provide end-to-end empowerment and efficiency improvement for industry partners and customers in the automotive software development process.
(The above content is from the keynote speech of "Software Factory" delivered by Zheng Xinhang, CTO of ETAS China, at the 5th Software-Defined Vehicle Forum 2024 and AUTOSAR China Day on March 12-14, 2024.) ）