Embedded Systems in Automotives
Dwij Patel Arizona State University
Introduction to Electric and
Autonomous Vehicles
Abstract—Electronic components have shown a significant
growth at an exponential rate in automobiles and with growth
of electronics, there is a strong need for software improvements
for the components to function efficiently. This research paper
mainly focuses on software for embedded systems, specifically
real-time operating system (RTOS). The paper depicts ideas
from two state of the art research papers addressing adaptive
real-time operating systems and machine learning based task
migration in automotive real-time embedded systems. The
growing complexity in automotive embedded systems has
resulted in a transition from single core to multicore
architectures. In automotives, such multicore architecture is
represented by RTOS which coordinates the CPU cores and
tasks according to different scheduling strategies. The first
paper proposes extension of RTOS with adaptive
functionalities. ECU consolidation is a process of minimizing
the amount of hardware devices used in a vehicle in order to
optimize testing, costs and resources. To implement this, one
needs to work with the same number of tasks/processes shared
between a smaller number of ECUs. Hence the idea of task
migration comes in action to add redundancy to automotive
systems. The second paper provides an implementation of an
architecture to test different machine learning techniques for
scheduling and deploying tasks to ECU with migration between
them. This implementation is also based on a real-time
operating system.
Keywords—real-time operating systems (RTOS), adaptive
multicore systems, ECU consolidation, task migration
I. INTRODUCTION (HEADING 1)
The automotive industry is one of the largest economies
in the world producing around 70 million cars every year. A
survey in 2006 showed that the cost for embedded system in
a car account for 25% of total cost of the vehicle and around
35% for a luxury high end vehicle. Embedded systems in
automobiles have evolved rapidly and will grow even more
rapidly due to technological progress, high-end demands
from customer and government legislation for a sustainable
future. The power electronics used in automotives have
shifted to gallium nitride (GaN) and silicon carbide (SiC) due
to the limits reached by silicon MOSFETs. Most of the
research is focused on battery and charging. As most
automotives are shifting to electric drives, the demand for
larger battery capacity and shorter charging time increases.
For this purpose, there is a strong requirement efficient
software that works parallel with modern electronics that
have high switching capabilities.
Recently, embedded software has been the fundamental
keystone to enable advanced functionality and features in
automobiles. Embedded software is not only used in modern
on-road vehicles but also in construction, mining, and
agricultural vehicles. The society of Automotive Engineers
(SAE) has defined 6 levels of automation, 0 being to
automation to 5 being full automation. The use of embedded
systems increases with increase in automation levels.
Embedded systems in automotive is divided in
Electronic/Engine Control Units (ECUs) distributed across
entire vehicle.
Tempe, AZ
dnpatel8@asu.edu
AUTmotive Open Systems Architecture (AUTOSAR) is
open and standardized automotive software architecture
which support standard interfaces between application
software and basic vehicular functions, and it helps in
establishing common ECU software architecture. In all
modern vehicles the ECUs are configured using AUTOSAR.
The application design in an automotive system is the
main priority in order to reduce the likelihood and effects of
traffic collisions. These collisions increase the risk of safety
integrity; therefore, a particular safety level is assigned and
various strategies of coordinating the cores are implemented.
In the first paper, researchers assumed that ECUs adhere to
the AUTOSAR standard and leverage the multicore
capabilities of real-time operating system described by this
standard. They propose the enhancement of automotive
safety by suggesting a modified version of the AUTOSAR
operating system with adaptive capabilities. The adaptive
capabilities are then demonstrated by distribution and
reallocation of crucial tasks between cores in case of core
malfunctioning.
ECU consolidation addressed the problem of growing
electronic devices by executing tasks on a small number of
powerful multi-purpose devices. But this type of system
presents difficulty in maximizing the efficiency of the system
ensuring that all the tasks get chance to execute, meeting
their deadlines. The researchers have investigated dynamic
task migration and proposed this method for facilitating ECU
consolidation. The second research paper focusses on the
possibility of using machine learning techniques to assign
tasks to different devices based on their prediction on
schedulability analysis.
II. ADAPTIVE REAL-TIME OPERATING SYSTEMS
Lockstep is inefficient, so authors make use of task
migration concept. There are 2 strategies for task migration:
recreation and replication from which the authors have made
use of replication strategy. If task is assigned on native core,
then a copy of same task in allocated to let’s say
target/migration core. As we have same tasks in two cores,
the task will run normally in native core and be in suspended
state in the target core. In case of malfunctioning of native
core, we just need to move the task in target core to ready
state. Due to this the context size is less and we can get over
the overhead of recreation.
There exists a shared memory between tasks on native
core and target core. Whenever a core is not able to execute a
task due to malfunction, the core tries to reset in order to
recover. If the core crashes even after some resets, a flag is
set in the shared memory. This flag generates an interrupt
demonstrating that migration is requested. The operating
system on target core gets this interrupt, thus the task to be
migrated is suspended in native core and its replica is put to
ready state in the target core. As the context of original task
in already saved in shared memory, there is no overhead for
context transfer and the replicated task can use this. Even
when the native core is back to normal operation, the
execution will not be transferred back in case of multiple
failures in future. It is only after every ECU reset, that the
native core is back to ready state and the replicated task on
target core will be suspended by default.
The authors have provided two cases where this
migration condition can occur. First is when a hardware
monitor detects an interrupt if a core crashes unexpectedly.
Second is when interrupt flag is set by the native core itself in
case of multiple software faults. In both the cases, the task
cannot be executed in native core and therefore migration is
required.
III. TASK MIGRATION, DEPLOYMENT AND EXECUTION
One of the challenges task migration faces is that real-
time constraints must be met because some automotive tasks
have hard deadlines. Missing of hard deadline results in fatal
incidents. Therefore, checking the integrity of machine
learning techniques on safety critical systems is necessary.
The authors have presented an architecture to simply
distribute a set of real-time tasks to set of ECUs which is
capable to adapt new task distributions in real time.
A. System and Test Setup
The system used here is an ARM based System on Chip
(SoC) Xilinx MPSoC with two processors: ARM Cortex-
A53 with 4 cores, and an ARM Cortex-R5 with 2 cores. For
this application only core 0 from A53 was used. This
hardware was used for all ECUs involved in the system. For
the real-time operating system, FreeRTOS was used due to
its extensive availability, support, and real-time capabilities
of implementing priority based preemptive scheduling. To
test the system, the test setup consists of a machine learning
based schedulability analysis algorithm and a task
deployment tool. The algorithm predicts whether a task
distribution will be able to execute correctly, and the
deployment tool generates task distributions, triggers
schedulability prediction and deploys best predicted task
distribution. The devices in the system communicate with the
deployment tool by using a task which receives a distributed
task set and responds with information on whether the task
set was executed successfully or if any deadlines were
missed. If the current task distribution misses at least one
deadline, it is deemed as unschedulable. The deployment tool
is responsible to detect failures on ECUs and generate new
task distributions.
B. Tasks
The authors have used two types of tasks in their
development: dummy tasks generated automatically to fill
the utilization of ECU; and a simulated autonomous task
which tests the system under a realistic use case. To keep it
simple, all the tasks in the system are periodic with their
deadlines relative to their periods. The dummy tasks are
generated using COBRA framework. This framework creates
tasks with random execution time and period until a certain
CPU utilization value is filled. The generated tasks have
period in range from 100ms to 10s. The autonomous task is
divided into two sub-tasks that shares a memory block. One
task is responsible for communication to send and receive
control or message signals, another task is responsible for
simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) to explore
surroundings. The SLAM subtask estimates object position
using a single LIDAR scan to check whether the mapping
has an obstacle. This task is used to check when the running
ECU faces problems to meet its deadline. Scheduling of
these tasks is done using the concept of utilization. As all the
tasks are periodic, the authors have considered two types of
scheduling policies for real-time systems: Rate Monotonic
(RM) and Earliest Deadline First (EDF). In rate monotonic
scheduling, tasks that have shorter periods are higher in
priority and therefore as the priorities are predefines, they are
static. On the other hand, for EDF scheduling, priority is
assigned to the task based on its earliest deadline occurrence
hence it is dynamic. In this case, to achieve highest
utilization possible along with devices meeting their
deadlines, the authors chose preemptive EDF scheduler. Due
to the limitations of FreeRTOS to offer the suggested policy,
ESFREE library is used extending the basic scheduler to add
dynamic priority policies.
IV. CONCLUSION
This paper discusses ideas from two state of the art
research papers on real-time embedded systems in
automotives. In the first paper, we discussed a modification
to the existing AUTOSAR standard to facilitate adaptive
migration of critical tasks across ECU cores to reduce latency
in automotive embedded systems. In the second paper, we
present the advantages of ECU consolidation with the aspect
of optimizing costs and resources. To attain ECU
consolidation, we used machine learning based task
migration in multicore ECU architectures. For future work,
the concepts from both the paper can be further extended and
combined where we can used shared memory from paper one
with the deployment tool from paper 2. The interrupt flag can
also be added in the EDF scheduling between multiple cores
to reduce latency of task migration.
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