Mode management in embedded systems in cars (1-2 students)

Handling modes in modern distributed systems, such as automotive electronics, is an increasingly complex topic. The complexity increase causes an increasing challenge in providing verification and validation of the implemented software. Feature and mode interaction between different functions cause unexpected side effects, as separately developed software is deployed on the same hardware platform.

Current architectures for automotive systems, such as Autosar, do not fully solve this issue in a satisfactory way. Hence, KTH has, in cooperation with an automotive company developed a concept for mode management in future distributed systems. This concept has been preliminary evaluated by modeling, but has not yet been implemented to run on real hardware.

In parallel, there is also ongoing work at KTH on building energy-efficient control algorithms for future hybrid cars. Hybrid car propulsion is a mode-intrinsic activity (there is switching between e.g. electric motor propulsion, hybrid propulsion, and pure combustion engine propulsion), and hence an ideal application for demonstration of the mode concept. Other possible demo applications could be e.g. safety-critical ones, such as brake-by-wire, and also non-critical ones, such as media. Thus a mixture of criticality levels of the software is reached – an important situation to validate being correctly handled.

Based on the mode management concept and previous work at KTH on implementation of middleware (through the DySCAS project and the DyLite implementation built during it), your task will be to implement a proof-of-concept system for the mode management concept. Hence, as a part of the master thesis, you are expected to accomplish the following:
• To choose a suitable platform (hardware, operating system, and design environment)
• To implement supervision of resource usage and a suitable mode management algorithm
• Implementing middleware communication
• Evaluation of the concept (including choice of evaluation criteria) and implementation by development of suitable demo applications on the platform, e.g. hybrid driveline management, brake by wire, and possibly media players.