Technical Insight
Accelerated Automotive Product Development using DevOps DR. ARUNKUMAR M. SAMPATH
Tata Consultancy Services
Introduction The automotive industry, which is more than 100 years old, has been going through significant disruption in multiple areas including technological advancements, accelerated product development cycles, green mobility initiatives, evolution of Internet of Vehicles (IoV), Edge Computing, Drive-by-Wire (XBW), and Over the Air (OTA) Software updates. As many of the vehicles have been increasingly adopting more and more advanced electronics and related Hardware and Software, in contrast to the earlier dominant mechanical systems, new features with increased complexity of development and launch are finding their place in the vehicles. Of late, the differentiators among different brands and vehicle variants on performance and features are noticeably defined by Software. Though software plays a very important role in enhancing capabilities in vehicles such as latest innovations in semi-autonomous driving, Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) etc., it is also creating development challenges for automotive
players with enormous costs of integration and upgradation of features, faster turnaround time, and bullet proof reliability and performance expected from customers, besides data privacy and cybersecurity. In the recent past, automotive OEMs had to incur expensive recalls to fix SW vulnerabilities due to hacking or to address issues such as non-deployment of airbags during crash situations. As can be seen from Figure 1 (Ref [1]), the software complexity has been increasing by many multiples (top solid curve) while development productivity and innovation in auto industry will barely increase by 2030 (bottom solid curve) with productivity of technology leaders, though outpacing the automotive players, still cannot catch up (middle dotted curve), indicating widening gap between SW complexity and productivity. Additionally, with rapidly evolving technology and the market dynamics demanding faster turnaround time, the non-availability of specific skilled workforce and/or difficulties in training or redeployment of resources in Automotive
Figure 1: Software Increasing Complexity (Ref [1])
6 | Telematics Wire | April 2022
OEMs and Tier 1,2 suppliers will further compound the problem of addressing the widening gap between SW complexity and productivity. Frequently, the development of automotive SW modules occurs in silos with little cross-pollination among teams within the OEMs and with other modules purchased from or co-developed with strategic suppliers, essentially stitching together discrete SW modules, which the OEMs try to convert into a proprietary SW platform. As new features on a next generation vehicle may call for new SW development or enhancement of existing SW on multiple domains comprising hundreds of functional components in the vehicle and on cloud (Figure 2, Ref [1]), OEMs typically interact with multiple suppliers and SW vendors to build the required capabilities, ending up with a piecemeal approach (operating systems, SW architectures, development languages etc.) as no single SW platform can meet all the needs. Though automotive OEMs significantly reduced the SW development costs and timelines by tapping into other industries such as a) Aerospace and Manufacturing automation for ADAS software, b) smartphone industry for infotainment and automotive variants of mobile operating systems, and c) real-time operating systems (RTOS) from embedded software vendors and semiconductor suppliers, development of automotive features increasingly relies on seamless integration among multiple vehicle subsystems with urgent need for end-to-end platform to connect everything together. The accelerated SW development, inter-connectivity of feature development on multiple vehicle subsystems, daunting task of SW interface control and integration,
