Designing Real-Time and Fault-Tolerant Middleware for Automotive Software

Automotive software development poses a great deal of challenges to automotive manufacturers since an automobile is inherently distributed and subject to fault-tolerance and real-time requirements. Middleware is a software layer that can handle the intrinsic complexities of distributed systems and arises as an indispensable run-time platform for automotive systems. This paper explains the concept of middleware by enumerating its functions and categorizes middleware according to adopted communication models. It also extracts five essential requirements of automotive middleware and proposes a middleware design for automotive systems based on the message-oriented middleware (MOM) structure. The proposed middleware effectively addresses the derived requirements and includes many essential features such as real-time guarantee, fault-tolerance, and a global time base