Modelling centralised automotive E/E software architectures

The automotive domain is living in an exciting period triggered by challenging business and technology drivers, like electrification, autonomous driving, over-the-air software updates and connected vehicles, just to mention a few. This profoundly impacted the electric and electronic automotive architecture and pushed more and more manufacturers to shift towards more centralised electric and electronic architectures for their future automotive software systems. In fact, future centralised architectures are considered to be pivotal to meeting the above mentioned market needs, as well as evolving customer requirements. In this work, we first analyse the readiness of four main automotive architectural languages to represent novel vehicle-centralised architectures. Based on the analysis results, we propose an extension to one of these languages to fully support the modelling of technical reference architectures for centralised vehicles. We validate the proposed extension using workshops with experts in the automotive domain and using an automotive use case describing an autonomous quarry.