Regensburg, Stuttgart. March 16, 2022. Vitesco Technologies, a leading international supplier of modern drive technologies and electrification solutions, is cooperating with Vector, the Stuttgart specialists for software and automotive electronics. The aim of the collaboration is to further accelerate software development in the field of coordinated vehicle movement with a central master controller. Vitesco Technologies brings around 25 years of software experience and system expertise for complete drive solutions to the current partnership. Vector supplies control unit software in accordance with the AUTOSAR Classic standard and also has the necessary expertise in the corresponding software components.

Both companies are long-standing members of the AUTOSAR development partnership, and will use their collaboration in the field of Vitesco Technologies master controllers to add a flexibility concept to the familiar industry standard to simplify the possible uses of AUTOSAR Classic in central control units as well.

Dr. Günther Heling, director of embedded software and systems at Vector, added: “We also see speed as the major advantage of close collaboration with Vitesco Technologies: We were able to make our solution available for series projects at the same time as the AUTOSAR standard was expanded.”

Large software systems define the drive

Software is increasingly becoming the decisive part of challenging automotive projects. This is primarily due to the electrification and centralization of increasingly computing-intensive functions, while at the same time increasing complexity. Large systems with more variants are increasingly running on a high-performance computer. The master controller from Vitesco Technologies is also based on this approach. 

While the software in previous systems with the individual functional areas in the drive, coordination of all vehicle movements, and energy management is distributed among multiple electronic control units with complex interconnectivity, this is combined in a central control unit during development of the master controller. This results in more complex and larger software systems. Making these new systems run reliably throughout requires qualified overall system expertise for hardware and software. Vitesco Technologies has many years of experience with both of these. As Continental Powertrain, the company was already a founding member of the AUTOSAR development partnership, and also headed various working groups. Thanks to Vector’s software expertise, particularly in the AUTOSAR Classic segment, Vitesco Technologies can concentrate more closely on software function development and system integration.

“In an electrified vehicle, a large number of software and function modules in a control unit have to coexist without any problems. It must also be possible to add and update individual function blocks without influencing all the others, or even having to re-generate the entire system,” explains Gerd Winkler, head of development for electronics and software architecture at Vitesco Technologies. This is exactly the purpose of the flexibility software concept, which has been part of the industry platform since AUTOSAR release 20/11. As part of the ongoing strategic partnership between Vitesco Technologies and Vector, a central vehicle control system based on software and hardware that is close to production is already being developed for a major German vehicle manufacturer.

Vitesco Technologies has now developed a virtualization framework (vAPP) as a new software technology. This makes it even easier to replace software modules (“apps”) in central control units within a lean AUTOSAR Classic architecture, something previously only possible with significantly more demanding and computing-intensive solutions with the AUTOSAR Adaptive standard.