Based on many years of experience in leadership positions within an automotive company, I have gained quite a good understanding of automotive development processes, E/E-system architectures, functional safety, and systems engineering. As the initiator of AUTOSAR, I have been following the AUTOSAR development since its origin. After my retirement at the end of 2008, I consulted OEMs and supplier companies on relevant topics. For many years, I have been acting as chairman for the Hanser Automotive conference on automotive networks giving me great insight into ongoing activities within the automotive industry.

Driven by the advent of innovative vehicle applications, contemporary automotive E/E architecture has reached a level of complexity that requires a technological breakthrough in order to manage it satisfactorily and fulfill the heightened passenger and legal requirements. This need is particularly acute for vehicle manufacturers and their leading Tier 1 supplier who are faced with often conflicting requirements from Legal enforcement – key items include environmental aspects and safety requirements Passenger convenience and service requirements from the comfort and entertainment functional domains Driver assistance and dynamic drive aspects – key items include detection and suppression of critical dynamic vehicle states and navigation in high-density traffic surroundings Leading OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers, having recognized this to be an industry-wide challenge, decided to work together to meet the challenge. Their common objective is to create a development base for industry collaboration on basic functions while providing a platform that continues to encourage competition on innovative functions. To this end a development partnership called Automotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) has been formed with the goals of: Standardization of basic software functionality of automotive ECUs Scalability to different vehicle and platform variants Transferability of software Support of different functional domains Definition of an open architecture Collaboration between various partners Development of highly dependable systems Support of applicable automotive international standards and state-of-the-art technologies The AUTOSAR scope includes all vehicle domains. The AUTOSAR standard will serve as a platform upon which future vehicle applications will be implemented and will also serve to minimize the current barriers between functional domains. It will, therefore, be possible to map functions and functional networks to different control nodes in the system, almost independently from the associated hardware.