Timing Predictability and Performance Standoff in Component-based Vehicle Software on Multi-core

Multi-core computing platforms have recently been introduced in the vehicle domain to enable novel data-intensive and computation-demanding features in advanced real-time embedded system applications (e.g., a modern car) that could not be supported by traditional single-core computing platforms. Although the existing model- and component-based software development techniques can efficiently deal with the challenge of managing the software complexity in these systems, the core challenge of ensuring their timing predictability comes at the cost of performance loss and underutilization of the systems’ resources. This paper identifies a sheer standoff between ensuring timing predictability and performance when the traditional model- and component-based software development techniques are used to develop software architectures of these systems. Note that ensuring timing predictability of a real-time system during its development is as important as ensuring its correct logical functionality. This paper takes the position that the traditional techniques fail to resolve this standoff mainly because they consider the following three viewpoints either in isolation or in pairs, but not altogether: (i) viewpoint of the software architecture modeling, (ii) viewpoint of the execution environment modeling, and (iii) viewpoint of the timing predictability verification. To mitigate this standoff, the paper discusses several approaches and points out opportunities for further research in developing a novel model- and component-based software development framework that jointly considers the three viewpoints during the development of these systems.