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For highly automated driving, commercial vehicles require an Electric/Electronic (E/E) architecture, which - in addition to sensor fusion - ensures safety-critical processes such as steering and braking at all times. Among other things, a redundant 24 V supply with corresponding disconnection is required. The battery switch is a key component. Commercial, construction, and agricultural vehicles (CAV) need to operate at the highest possible availability and the lowest possible cost of ownership. This is why automated and autonomous driving has the potential to revolutionize the CAV sector. Driverless machines can be operated around the clock and almost non-stop. Platooning allows automated, interconnected trucks to drive in a convoy and very close to each other. Platooning saves fuel.

The development of highly automated driving functions (AD) recently rises the demand for so called Fail-Operational systems for native driving functions like steering and braking of vehicles. Fail-Operational systems shall guarantee the availability of driving functions even in presence of failures. This can also mean a degradation of system performance or limiting a system’s remaining operating period. In either case, the goal is independency from a human driver as a permanently situation-aware safety fallback solution to provide a certain level of autonomy. In parallel, the connectivity of modern vehicles is increasing rapidly and especially in vehicles with highly automated functions, there is a high demand for connected functions, Infotainment (web conference, Internet, Shopping) and Entertainment (Streaming, Gaming) to entertain the passengers, who should no longer occupied with driving tasks.

Software complexity of vehicles is constantly growing especially with additional autonomous driving features being introduced. This increases the risk for bugs in the system, when the car is delivered. According to a car manufacturer, more than 90% of availability problems corresponding to Electronic Control Unit (ECU) functionality are either caused by software bugs or they can be resolved by applying software updates to overcome hardware issues. The main concern are sporadic errors which are not caught during the development phase since their trigger condition is too unlikely to occur or is not covered by the tests. For such systems, there is a need of safe and secure infield diagnosis. In this paper we present a tool software architecture with remote access, which facilitates standard read/write access, an efficient channel interface for communication and file I/O, and continuous trace.