Tailoring Automotive E/E Architectures with Design Space Exploration

Automotive E/E architectures truly became a creative ground for designers to innovate. Yet, we face a glass-ceiling trying to exploit such potential with existing tools, which led produced heterogeneous architectures to be altered over and over again. However, the subject remains neither simple nor in the hand of a single actor: carmakers, OEMs and standard consortiums do share responsibilities for those ambitious architectures. We developed a more meta oriented methodology, illustrated with us integrating an abstracted driving monitoring system (DMS) onto an external system. As a result, we found it possible to progressively move toward complex solutions while navigating the solution space. Moreover, this guided design space exploration (DSE) also allows us to backtrack to former decisions later on. For example, backtracking would occur if we receive new priorities from decision makers, which would involve a re-evaluation of our constraints. Compared to existing solutions, we encompass the entire design process as to view the target system as a single project, rather than an aggregation of components. This, at last, helps with global optimization and the avoid-ance of side effects otherwise brought at the final integration phase. Though promising, we are still in the process of seeing if our method will remain simple enough against the combinatory explosion of an exhaustive architectural description.