Introduction

The automotive business changed a lot during the last decades. Earlier a car was built up from poor hardware, without any software. During the last time there was a huge change: nowadays software is much more important in a car, than the hardware. All big companies are looking for software solutions on challenges, such as autonomous driving or environment friendly driving (E-cars, better engine controllers etc.). And to resolve these problems, there's a huge need for good and efficient software.

I've been working for more than 5 years in the automotive business and I still think that it is a really challenging and innovative area for software developers. Let me give you a better overview.

Software related areas in automotive

There are several areas in the automotive business, where software has a high focus. I will introduce them below, however there are other areas where software is involved and I’m not mentioning them.

ADAS

ADAS is an abbreviation of Advanced Driving Assistant Systems. This involves basically everything which brings the classical, human-based driving in the direction of autonomous driving. Several systems are already available in serial models, like: adaptive cruise control, lane keeping assistance, park assistant systems etc. But additional solutions are expected within the next few years which will enable autonomous driving in different environments (highway, country road, city).

From a software developer perspective these tasks are strongly related to robotics. Based on the inputs of sensors, like radar, lidar, cameras and ultrasonic sensors, by using additional inputs from the map and about the state of the car (current velocity, steering wheel angle etc.) it should be calculated what is the right reaction of the car.

Of course this process is split into several substeps, like sensor information preprocessing, sensor fusion, object prediction, trajectory planning etc.

Usually a lot of mathematics is involved in this area using technologies of signal processing, computer vision or artificial intelligence.

I think this area is maybe the most challenging area of automotive software development.

Engine control

Controlling the engine is done by software, which can be really challenging in the days when saving the environment is in focus and the related standards are very strict. To be able to achieve them very good software solutions are needed.

There’s even a trend of electrical cars. Their engine also needs strong software support to achieve an efficient energy consumption.

Brake control

Nowadays every new has an ABS (Anti-lock Braking System), which is a great software based support to achieve safe braking even in case of high speed or slippery road surface.

Next to that cars have several additional brake assistant systems, like differential scanning calorimetry (DSC) electrical stability control (ESC) etc. These are mostly software based systems, sometimes even with pretty complicated calculations in the background.

Automatic Gears

Automatic gear is also working in a software based manner nowadays.

Active and passive safety

Another big area is active and passive safety. Let's see what is included here.

Passive safety contains the classical safety features, like seat belts and airbags and pedestrian safety systems as well. Some software is already involved here, but that’s not really the focus here.

Passive safety is more interesting from a software point of view, however it is overlapping with other categories, like ADAS and brake control. It contains all the systems which can help to avoid an accident or just lowering the risks by lowering the velocity before an accident. That involves emergency brake systems, blind spot detection, adaptive cruise control, ABS, ESC, driver monitoring and lane departure warning. These systems require strong software support.

And I think it is really a good goal to work for decreasing the number of accidents on the roads.

Lighting

Modern cars have a proper system to control their lightning to light always with the right intensity to the right direction. To be able to do it some software support is needed, like detection of other light etc.

Infotainment

Classically infotainment contains everything that stands for the communication between the car and the driver, it involves all screens and touch screens, voice recognition, buttons on the cockpit and on the steering wheel etc. It always includes more and more functionalities, like multimedia, navigation, mobile communication etc. Of course these all require great software based solutions.

Navigation

It is a subpart of infotainment, but it is complex enough to mention it separately. Nowaday navigation requires next to great visualization and audio instructions. Also very good localization and path planning based on several inputs. There are challenging cases, like navigation in a tunnel or navigation in complicated, multi-leveled junctions.

Car2car communication

This topic is really pointing into the future, to the world of self-driving cars, but it is already part of our present. In such a system that’s a huge advantage if the cars can communicate with each other, share their planned movements, share what they can see or share their route. Additionally, cars can also communicate with the infrastructure: traffic lights etc. There are already solutions where the traffic light is changing if a bus arrives.

Additionally we can not rely on the internet, since there’s no signal for example in tunnels, so there’s a lot of challenge on the communication layer as well.

As more and more traffic participants start to communicate more and more information it will become a really interesting domain for both big data and wireless network solutions.

Tooling and simulation

Last but not least a huge area in tooling and simulation which is about developing small (and sometimes even complex) programs which can support the developers in activities like testing, simulation, visualization, parameter adjusting etc. At first it can sound easy but in reality it can also be pretty complex, especially if we are talking about traffic and car simulation.

Used technologies in automotive

The software development in the automotive sector is mostly embedded development, except tooling, that’s pure desktop development. Nowadays mobile application development is also part of automotive, since there are more and more situations when our mobile phone communicates with our car.

The core development used to be based on embedded C, but nowadays most companies are changing to use modern C++.

The tool development is mostly done in Python, in some cases in C++ or Java.

Popular frameworks are also used, like OpenCV, OpenCL, ROS etc.

THe model based approaches are also popular, so UML or Simulink is often used in the automotive sector.

Other than that all classical testing methodology is used, like unit testing mocking, higher level testing, software in loop, hardware in loop.

From the domain perspective all knowledge of robotics, computer vision, artificial intelligence or network programming is welcomed.

Of course up to the project and company this stack may change.

Development process in automotive

The development of the software of a car is done in multiple sections. First usually it starts as a research project. Its goal is to find the right technical solutions. The next step is a pre-serial development, it is still not dedicated for a model, it is a kind of overall solution. And the last step is the serial development, which has the goal to develop a proper software for dedicated models.

However more and more automotive companies are changing to work in a more agile approach, automotive software development is traditionally convervative and strict.

There’s a framework called Automotive Spice which should follow at most of the serial development projects. This framework is very strict and it requires you to document the requirements clearly, link the software design and related code. As well as the test should be properly documented and linked to software requirements and code.

Biggest challenges of automotive software development

Finally I’d like to point out some domain specific challenges.

No bugs in serial software allowed

As the development of the software is done it will be flashed on thousands of microcontrollers (ECUs). Currently most of the OEMs are flashing them manually one by one and there’s no opportunity for remote flashing. That means that to change the software on an already released car requires bringing it to the workshop and reflashing its software. It is of course inconvenient for the customer and costly for the company.

That’s why finding the major bug after the final release is really painful and should be avoided. In order to avoid such situations the testing of the software needs to be done in a really proper way.

Real Time communication network

In a modern car there are really a lot of microcontrollers (ECUs) and several sensors which are communicating with them (cameras, radar, lidar, ultrasonic sensors, wheel impulse counter sensor, rain sensor etc.) The communication between these sensors and ECUs should be really fast in order to avoid shortages which may lead to accidents. Package loss or communication errors are also risky because of the same reason.

Small capacity of processor and memory

The software needs to be written only once, but from the hardware thousands of units need to be produced. It absolutely makes sense to save money on the hardware by using a cheaper processor or a small memory.

On the other hand the software needs to be developed in a way that it is fitting well with this smaller capacity hardware, which can be challenging for the software development team.

Functional Safety

We all know that in a complex system a lot of things can go wrong: sensor failure, communication failures, unknown software bugs, memory failures etc. A car should be able to handle these situations in the right way. It should be able to detect and handle such situations in a safe manner to avoid or reduce such risks as much as possible. In order to do that a standard called ISO26262 should be followed during the whole development process. It provides a methodology to identify and classify the possible failures and to prepare the software to react on them in the best possible way.

Technically these solutions can be based on checking inconsistent inputs and outputs, on using multiple sensors to receive the same input and in certain cases to do the same computation parallel on multiple controllers with different algorithms.

Security

Since the goal of functional safety is to prevent risks caused by the failure of our own system, the goal of security is to prevent risks caused by externals. In the century of computer viruses and hackers it is very important to have a proper mechanism to guard the system from possible manipulations coming from outside, since they could cause serious accidents. This is a new area in automotive which has a really high focus and which involves huge challenges.

Summary

After more than 5 years as a software developer in the automotive business I see this area as a really challenging area, which needs more and more software developers. If you are considering changing your domain don’t forget about automotive.