Towards virtualization concepts for novel Automotive HMI systems

Abstract

Many innovations in the automotive industry are based on electronics and software, which has led to a steady increase of electronic control units (ECU) in cars. This brought up serious scalability and complexity issues in terms of cost, installation space, and energy consumption. In order to tackle these problems, there is a strong interest to consolidate ECUs using virtualization technologies. However, current efforts largely neglect legal constraints and certification issues and the resulting technical requirements. In this paper, we focus on the consolidation of graphics hardware through virtualization, which received a lot of interest in the car industry due to the growing relevance of HMI systems such as head unit and instrument cluster in modern cars. First, we investigate relevant ISO standards and legal requirements and derive seven technical requirements for a virtualized automotive HMI system. Based on these requirements, we present the concept for a Virtualized Automotive Graphics System (VAGS) that allows for the consolidation of mixed-criticality graphics ECUs. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2013.