A graph classification approach to secure the compatibility of software and hardware configurations in distributed automotive systems

Software-defined, highly customizable vehicle architectures drastically increase the number of hardware–software constellations that must be validated, especially under safety and timing constraints. Traditional unit and integration testing, as well as current regression and combinatorial methods, cannot practically cover this configuration space or reliably capture emergent effects arising from complex interactions, such as bandwidth contention and non-linear latency behavior. This work presents a proof-of-concept for predictive, situational validation of self-describing hardware and software components within realistic automotive E/E architectures. Proposing a novel Machine Learning- (ML) based method for early systemic feasibility prediction of automotive configurations using Graph Neural Networks (GNNs). Specifically, the subclass Graph Isomorphism Networks (GINs) is applied to predict the compatibility of a randomly composed configuration of software and hardware components, assessing both structural compatibility and functional stability. The trained models achieve recall and prediction accuracies above 90%, even when detailed behavioral metadata is hidden during training, indicating that systemic incompatibilities are learnable from topological features alone. Results were achieved from training on a realistic, synthetic dataset representing less than 10 e^(-27) of all possible permutations without finetune or further parameter optimization. It demonstrates the potential of GIN-based graph learning to enable early, automated feasibility assessment, substantially reducing testing time and development effort for modular, personalized, and update-capable vehicle architectures.