A Service-Oriented Design Framework for Automotive Architectures

In recent years, the automotive industry has undergone a profound transformation, driven by the growing demand for advanced functionalities such as autonomous driving, advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), and sophisticated infotainment platforms. These innovations have led to a significant increase in the complexity of vehicle electronics, challenging the limits of traditional architectures based on numerous Electronic Control Units (ECUs), each dedicated to a specific function (like braking or managing the engine) and interconnected through legacy protocols like CAN or LIN. This complexity has highlighted the limitations of static and tightly coupled systems, making it increasingly difficult to integrate new features in a modular and scalable way. To address these challenges, the industry is gradually shifting toward Service-Oriented Architectures (SOA), in which software services are designed to be independent, interoperable, and dynamically deployable, enabled by the adoption of standardized interfaces. This paradigm, supported by modern communication protocols such as SOME/IP over Ethernet, promotes flexibility, reusability, and scalability. This thesis, carried out in collaboration with Italdesign, explores the transition toward Service-Oriented Architectures in the automotive domain, proposing an innovative and distributed approach to service management, and also streamlining the path from system modeling to the development and validation of a working application. The proposed methodology aims to reduce production times, which are currently long and fragmented due to the involvement of multiple stakeholders (OEMs and Tier-1s), making it possible to quickly generate testable prototypes directly from the architectural model.