Modular Over-the-air Software Updates for Safety-critical Real-time Systems

Abstract

Automotive software is undergoing a rapid change toward artificial intelligence and towards more and more connectedness with other systems. For both, an incremental design paradigm is desired, where the car's software is frequently updated after production but still can guarantee the highest automotive safety standards. We present a design flow and tool framework enabling a DevOps paradigm for automotive software development. DevOps means that software is developed in a continuous loop of development, deployment, usage in the field, collection of runtime data and feedback to the developers for the next design iteration. The software developers get support in defining, developing, and verifying new software functions based on the data gathered in the field by the previous software generation. The software developers can define contracts describing the time and resource assumptions on the integration environment and guarantees for other dependent software components in the system. These contracts allow a composition of software components and proof obligations to be discharged at design time through virtual integration testing and runtime through continuous monitoring of assumptions and guarantees on the software component's interfaces. An update package, consisting of the software component and its contracts, is then automatically created, transferred over the air, and deployed in the car. Monitors derived from the contracts allow for supervising the system's behavior, detecting failures at runtime, and annotating the situation to be included in a data collection, fueling the next design iteration.