Interoperability is the ability of two systems or components to exchange information and to use the information that has been exchanged [1]. The complexity of automotive systems has increased over the years. The number of embedded systems in the vehicle is ever increasing. Under these circumstances, interoperability becomes critical to reduce redundancy in the system. A typical use case is multiple systems making use of information from a single sensor. There are also other motivations for exchange of information - market dominance of a particular software product (the usage of third party software), financial benefits (use of open/modular software architecture like Autosar®), and performance improvements (Vehicle to Infrastructure communication) etc.
In this paper, the authors would like to present the interoperability challenges in an automotive embedded software environment. Specifically, interoperability while dealing with third party software is expounded along with examples. In addition to technical challenges, the paper also highlights other challenges like Intellectual Property (IP), business models etc and explores the approaches to overcome these challenges.