When drivers are asked what they expect from vehicles in the future, the most common response is safety, followed by efficiency, comfort and flexibility. From a technology standpoint, this translates into a demand for increased networking capability, both within the vehicle and with its environment. Today's vehicles are evolving into a progressively complex network of systems with different requirements, be it reliability or quality. Particularly in the field of electromobility, the challenge is designing solutions to support state-of-the-art communication architectures for new vehicles and operating concepts. Future vehicles will be extensively networked with the environment in order to support new services and driver assistance functions. As the level of networking and number of new applications grows, both internal and external communication requirements will become even more complex, a trend that will spur the creation of new software architectures and end-to-end development processes. This will result in new approaches that enable the abstract description of functional and non-functional characteristics and allow engineers to use the information during the entire development process, from specification and testing to commissioning.

Research Groups

Research Spheres and Results

To satisfy the consumer's desire for safety, efficiency, comfort and flexibility, future vehicles will feature a high level of seamless network connectivity. With this background, Fraunhofer ESK is examining technologiesand methods in a wide range of areas including:

• Efficient automotive system technologies, from networks to middleware system
• Vehicle-to-environment networking for traffic efficiency/safety and infotainment applications
• Design methods for automotive applications in complex, adaptive environments

By carrying out research into new technologies, methods and models, the Automotive business unit supports automobile manufacturers and suppliers in the areas of ECU development, new in-vehicle communication technology design and vehicle-to-environment networking. To transfer these new technologies and methods into standards, this business unit actively participates in groups such as AUTOSAR, GENIVI and the CAR 2 CAR Communication Consortium.

Research Focus

The Automotive Networks research group focuses its activities on state-of-the-art networking technologies. The objective is to simplify the domain-wide communication of vehicle functions through software architectures built on Ethernet and IP technologies. In the field of electromobility, which is characterized by software-controlled, highly-decentralized E-vehicle drive trains, this group is examining concepts for safe and energy-efficient communication architectures for the electrical/electronics (E/E) systems. The efficient utilization of multicore and real-time systems is also being analyzed.

The Automotive Connectivity research group is developing its own Car-to-X framework designed to integrate driver assistance systems by relying on communication and sensor data. The research activities focus on adaptive service platforms and platforms for data aggregation and data merging for driver assistance systems. Researchers are also looking at data management systems to support end-to-end (home-to-vehicle) infotainment network infrastructures.

The Automotive Software research group is actively engaged in the area of model-based software development, new architecture designs and tool platforms. The research emphasizes model-based tools and toolchains for end-to-end development and testing, as well as methods for adapting the ECU network to dynamic driving situations while taking into account non-functional requirements.