Software-defined machines (SDMs) were a top-of-mind topic at the recent 2024 SAE COMVEC event in Schaumburg, Illinois, with experts expounding on where the industry stands today and where it can go. In brief, while the long-term outlook is bright, the road ahead is anything but smooth.

“Software-defined probably has more value with the commercial-vehicle sector than it does in the passenger-vehicle sector, because we can actually increase the economics of the vehicles. We are all there to get a job done,” said Dr. Moritz Neukirchner, senior director of strategic product management for SDVs at Elektrobit.

Software-defined does not mean simply adding connectivity or over-the-air update capabilities to a vehicle, Neukirchner noted. Rather, it means “that you can change the nature or the function of the device by changing the software. When you look at your phone, you don’t even care too much about the hardware, you care about the access to the ecosystem of that phone.”

Peter Rödin, VP of embedded systems at Navistar, emphasized the need for companies to adapt to capitalize on software’s promise. “Since most of the customer value in the future will be based on what we do with software, we need to change the way that we operate and the way that we develop,” he said. “We need to stop thinking about just evolving our traditional product lines and adding all-new features. We need to completely revise the way we think about this. If we don’t have this mindset shift, we will not be able to take the steps that are needed.”

This necessary “paradigm shift,” an oft-referenced term at SAE COMVEC, is not an easy undertaking, nor is development of the underlying E/E architecture required to enable SDMs. Martin Schleicher, head of software strategy at Continental, discussed the move away from a distributed E/E architecture with many ECUs toward a more flexible, centralized one.

“Today we see a transformation to server-zone architectures with an HPC [high-performance computer] able to run complex software functions and add new features faster and more simply,” Schleicher said. “In the future, maybe in 10 years, we expect a central-server architecture with one to three central HPCs which are not dependent on a certain function driving the architecture … Here it is possible to decouple hardware and software relatively easily.” The HPCs essentially serve as an integration platform for software and services from various providers, he said.

Nico Hartmann, CTO of Qorix GmbH, offered a sobering perspective on the state of software-defined, which he said is currently in the third iteration of development. “The complexity has been underestimated every time, by everyone. We should not think that we have it now. I think we still underestimate the complexity of it.”

One of several technical challenges Hartmann detailed is runtime. “We have in classic applications five, maybe 10 applications that are brought down to a single ECU, but in the software-defined vehicle it’s 100 to 200,” he said. “So now 100 to 200 applications fight for computing resources, and all these applications have been developed by different companies – some from the OEMs, some from the tiers, some from third parties.

“What we see is if we integrate those, there is basically no rules how these applications consume resources from our powerful central device,” Hartmann continued. “The result is pretty much chaos, and we see very unstable execution scenarios. That is a challenge we have to solve – how to find an orchestration system that everything goes neatly in the traffic on the CPU.”

Qorix, a joint venture of KPIT Technologies and ZF Friedrichshafen, is developing open and scalable middleware stacks that it claims can help the transition to a central-compute architecture.

Hartmann added: “No one at the current point in time has an easy life in getting this type of architecture working in the field, and we are not talking about maintaining them over 15 years – we’re talking about getting them to work at all.”

The commercial-vehicle sector appears set on a software-defined future, but what experts at SAE COMVEC made clear is it’ll be no simple task to achieve.