Design and evaluation of a customizable multi-domain reference architecture on top of product lines of self-driving heavy vehicles - an industrial case study

Abstract

Self-driving vehicles are of high interest for academia and industry at the moment. Particularly, in the transportation domain they exhibit a huge potential to increase companies' competitiveness by automating delivery tasks or construction work. This industrial case study reports on the process of developing and evaluating a multi-domain reference architecture concerned with commercial transport mission planning, execution, and tracking for self-driving vehicles. Therefore, internal and external stakeholders as well as development documents were consulted. The resulting reference architecture is evaluated based on its underlying non-functional requirements ensuring early confirmation of compliance with stakeholder needs. A concrete variant of the architecture was also deployed on a Volvo FMX truck and practically evaluated in an exemplary construction site setting. This paper summarizes our work Schroeder et al. [Sc15] published at 2015 ICSE.