An Investigation of the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform from an Industry Perspective

2026-07-06

AI Summary

This study addresses critical pain points in AUTOSAR Adaptive application development by revealing, for the first time from an industrial practice perspective, their root causes: inherent challenges arising from the interplay among the specification’s own architectural design and reuse objectives, vendor-specific implementation variations, and localized usage patterns. Employing a design science research methodology, the authors construct a minimal viable platform prototype and integrate configuration management analysis with runtime lifecycle modeling to systematically identify and attribute key issues. The primary contribution lies in demonstrating that design flaws at the specification level are the core catalysts of these challenges. The work further proposes optimizing the toolchain to reduce configuration complexity and training overhead, thereby offering empirical evidence and actionable pathways for improving the AUTOSAR Adaptive ecosystem.

Abstract

The reliance on software as a distinguishing factor in the automotive industry is increasing. With a combined reliance on vendor-supplied software and cost-effective implementation, the AUTOSAR consortium was initialized to provide standardized platform specifications that enable re-use. Specifically, the AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform (AP) specification aims to provide a high-performance service-oriented architecture. Objective: The goal of this study is to investigate what pain-points emerge when developing AUTOSAR Adaptive applications and whether they originate from the platform specification, its vendor-implementation, or its local usage. Methods: We conduct a Design Science Research study, developing a minimal AP that serves as an experimental prototype for our investigation. Results: We find that a combination of specification-inherent, implementation-based, and local practices contributes to the emergence of pain-points. Conclusions: We conclude that there are AUTOSAR specification-inherent reasons for pain-points, resulting from architectural choices and re-use goals. The implication for development organizations is the need to mitigate these effects through tooling that better supports configuration file management and reduces developer training time to properly understand the adaptive application runtime life-cycle.

Problem

• AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform
• pain-points
• software standardization
• automotive software
• service-oriented architecture

Innovation

• AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform
• Design Science Research
• service-oriented architecture
• configuration management
• software reuse