A Standard Driven Software Architecture for Fully Autonomous Vehicles

The goal of this paper is to design a functional software architecture for fully autonomous vehicles. Existing literature takes a descriptive approach and presents past experiments with autonomous driving or implementations specific to limited domains (e.g. winning a competition). The architectural solutions are often an after-math of building or evolving an autonomous vehicle and not the result of a clear software development life-cycle. A major issue of this approach is that requirements can not be traced with respect to functional components and several components group most functionality. Therefore, it is often difficult to adopt the proposals. In this paper we take a prescriptive approach starting with requirements from an automotive standard. We use a NIST reference architecture for real-time, intelligent, systems and well established architectural patterns to support the design principles. We further examine the results with respect to the automotive software development life cycle and compliance with automotive safety standards. Lastly, we compare our work with other proposals.