Journal of Automotive Software Engineering

The development of self-driving vehicles is often regarded as adding a layer of intelligence on top of classic vehicle platforms. However, the amount of software needed to reach autonomy will exceed the software deployed for operation of normal vehicles. As complexity increases, the demand for proper structure also increases. Moreover, the shift from open, deterministic components to more opaque, probabilistic software components raises new challenges for system designers. In this paper we introduce a functional software architecture for fully autonomous vehicles aimed to standardise and ease the development process. Existing literature presents past experiments with autonomous driving or implementations specific to limited domains (e.g. winning a competition). The architectural solutions are often an after-math of building or evolving an autonomous vehicle and not the result of a clear software development life-cycle. A major issue of this approach is that requirements cannot be traced with respect to functional components and several components group most functionality. Therefore, it is often difficult to adopt the proposals. In this paper we take a prescriptive approach starting with requirements from a widely adopted automotive standard. We follow a clear software engineering process, specific to the automotive industry. During the design process, we make extensive use of robotic architectures – which seem to be often ignored by automotive software engineers – to support standard driven requirements.