Options for introducing SOVD in SDV architectures

The trend for the future mobility concepts in the automotive industry is clearly moving towards autonomous driving and IoT applications in general. Already today, vehicle manufacturers offer semi-autonomous driving. The technical capabilities and the legal requirements are under development. The introduction of data- and computation-intensive functions is changing vehicle architectures towards zonal architectures based on high-performance computers (HPC). Availability of data-connection to the backend and the above explained topics have a major impact on the way how to test and update such ‘software-defined’ vehicles and entire fleets. Vehicle diagnostics will become a key element for onboard test and update operations running on HPCs, as well as for providing vehicle data to the offboard backend infrastructure via Wi-Fi and 5G at the right time. The standard for Service Oriented Vehicle Diagnostics (SOVD) supports this development. It describes a programming interface for a diagnostic system integrated in the vehicle. It is a very suitable API for all vehicle architectures capable of fully onboard testing and updating software. Nevertheless, many car manufactures will have to define a migration path for introducing it step-by-step throughout the entire life cycle. For this reason, a combination of SOVD-capable and UDS-based legacy onboard and offboard systems will become essential. This paper explains the ideas and the concept of the SOVD standard, shows ideas of handling legacy and the “new world” in a lean approach and illustrates them with some practical examples. In a next step, the SOVD functionality described in the standard document is compared with today’s UDS-based diagnostic approaches and the existing data processes behind them. Finally, the results if SOVD has the potential to entirely replace UDS-based diagnostic.