Fleet in the Loop: An Open Source approach for design and test of resilient vehicle architectures

Due to the increasing automation and connectivity of future, software-defined vehicles, the interest in safety and security in this field is growing. In contrast to automated driving functions, which today are only tested and approved for specific operating conditions, the vehicle must be safe and secure in any situation, even if there is a malfunction or intentional manipulation. Resilient software and hardware architectures for vehicles are, therefore, a research topic of growing importance. However, due to the holistic nature of this approach, researching and testing these systems is fraught with challenges. For example, once Machine Learning-based approaches come into play, large amounts of data are required. At the same time, tests of the systems need to take into account the whole vehicle and its ecosystem and be scalable and user-friendly. This work, therefore, presents a new simulation-based method for testing and developing functions for software-defined connected vehicles. The focus is especially on safety and security in combination with cloud services and the consideration of the vehicle fleet. The technologies are presented in detail, relying mainly on the simulator CARLA, the virtualization with Proxmox, and ROS2-based vehicle functions. What differentiates this approach from others is the purely virtual and open-source approach, which increases the availability for others. Results are shown based on early quantitative measures and on outlining two exemplary use cases.