As the industry moves towards software-defined vehicles (SDVs), characterised by an increasing number of software components, intricate dependencies, and more complex underlying hardware resources, a new layer of complexity has emerged.
This trend has presented designers with several challenges such as:
- The exhaustive testing of all possible states becomes unfeasible as traditional correct-by-testing methodologies are ineffective.
- The task of efficiently allocating software components to resources, while adhering to design constraints, has become increasingly complex.
- Ensuring consistent end-to-end timing from sensors to actuators is more crucial and challenging than ever.
- Maintaining system integrity under scenarios of CPU and network overloads requires innovative solutions.
MotionWise Schedule looks to address these issues and has adopted a correct-by-design approach.
“Our best-in-class scheduling algorithms ensure that software components and communication is mapped to the hardware resources so that safety and real-time behaviour can be achieved”, said Dr. Stefan Poledna, CTO and Co-Founder of TTTech Auto. He continued, “This method significantly reduces the time required for software releases, encompassing design, testing and validation phases. The MotionWise Schedule runtime enforces configuration outcomes, offering a safe execution environment that includes safe real-time and run-time scheduling, guaranteed end-to-end timing, Freedom From Interference (FFI) for mixed-criticality systems, and deterministic execution among other properties.”
TTTech Auto introduced MotionWise, a safety middleware designed for distributed architectures requiring safety and real-time properties, back in 2018. Today, it is deployed in more than 2 million vehicles, with a secured pipeline of more than 9 million in the years to come.
MotionWise Schedule is the first modular solution from the new MotionWise family. It contains all the technology developed for MotionWise but in a modular and flexible product, enabling a seamless integration with standardised based architectures as well as custom ones.
Effective scheduling is not merely about performance enhancement but is rather a fundamental element ensuring safety and real-time execution, and so TTTech Auto’s MotionWise Schedule offers the following features:
- Scheduling of tasks and network communication allows to achieve higher resource utilisation and performance providing a correct-by-design approach. It maps tasks to CPU cores and defines the required network configuration for Time Sensitive Networking (TSN). Thus, it enables highly optimised multi-CPU core and multi-SoC solutions.
- Time-Triggered execution provides a time-boxed isolation between tasks, enabling mix-criticality and composability. This results in lower testing and verification efforts for real-time tasks, determinism and execution repeatability, as well as faster system integration.
- The newly added support for dataflow driven scheduling adds flexibility for developers, it supports dataflow dependencies and allows to dynamically switch between different dataflows. Modelling is simple and efficiently based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAG) with parallel execution on multiple CPU cores.
- Computation chains can be easily modelled and their end-to-end latency bounds (from sense to act) are enforced across multiple CPU cores and SoCs.
- Task monitoring is provided to gain comprehensive insights into task performance and sequencing allowing for real-time analysis and system level optimization.
- Time synchronisation across multiple SoCs and Ethernet TSN is provided for time-triggered execution and communication, minimised latency, and real-time performance analysis.
- A powerful and intuitive tooling allows to visualise schedules and supports comparisons of plans versus actual execution. This enables faster and more efficient pinpointing of resource issues and supports faster system level optimisations.
- MotionWise Schedule is standard friendly. It supports AUTOSAR, POSIX, Data Distribution Service (DDS) and Time Sensitive Networking (TSN).
- MotionWise Schedule abstracts software functionality from the hardware with its powerful tooling and run-time. It supports mixed-criticality systems and supports incremental updates with vastly reduced re-validation efforts.
In SDV projects, manual configuration of schedulers often leads to a cycle of repeating testing and iterations. With each code alteration or addition of a new feature, with every new software release the process re-starts, causing delays in start of production (SOP) timelines and escalating costs.
MotionWise Schedule looks to circumvent this. It does this by providing:
- An overarching scheduling concept encompassing workload separation based on criticality, task dependency scheduling, and failure handling.
- Tools that operationalise this concept and streamline configuration and integration processes.
- An embedded stack that actualizes these functionalities within the vehicle.
TTTech Auto is currently modularising its middleware platform MotionWise and will release further additional modules in the near future.
