Adaptive AUTOSAR (AA) is the buzz word in the context of highly automated driving (HAD). It is the AUTOSAR consortium’s solution for high performance computing and flexible over-the-air updates in HAD and also other ECUs such as Domain Controllers, Infotainment systems etc.
While Classic AUTOSAR (CA) offers an excellent solution to handle traditional ECUs with deeply embedded software and hard real time requirements, it cannot handle HAD and other such intelligent ECUs because its design does not support the high performance and flexibility requirements of these ECUs. This sprung the need to develop a new platform for such ECUs and thus was born AA.
An OEM or Tier-1 chooses AA so that they do not have to reinvent the wheel for an architectural solution for the Intelligent ECUs.
Due to the safety criticality of these Intelligent ECUs, AA incorporates several safety aspects as part of its architecture. In this blog, we have highlighted 11 of the key differentiating aspects.
However, as you may know, Safety is a system property. Simply using an ASIL AA solution from a provider like Vector or Elektrobit will not make a system safe. The ASIL AA solution can, at best, be treated as an SEooC.
Before we go into these safety aspects, let us look at a view of the “functional clusters” in AA. Each functional cluster offers a set of services to the Application. The safety-related functional clusters highlighted in green in this picture achieve many of the safety aspects that we have discussed below.
The 11 safety critical aspects in AA are
1. Safety considerations for high performance oriented hardware
2. Support for Safe and Secure use of C++
3. Safe Software configuration update
4. Safe Initialization and shutdown
5. Safety and Security Merger
6. Safe Service oriented Communication
7. Platform health Management (PHM)
8. Safe State Management
9. Time Synchronization
10. PSE51 compliant OS
11. Safe persistent data
Let's get into details of these 11 aspects in our subsequent blogs.