The European automotive industry is undergoing a revolution by the upcoming technologies of software-defined vehicles (SDV) and connected cooperative and automated mobility (CCAM). In a globally challenging context, in which Europe lost market share, the local automotive software and electronics market still expects a 11.9% compound annual growth rate from 2025 to 2030 – even more accentuated with the increasing adoption of advanced driver assistance (ADAS) and autonomous driving (AD). Both SDV and CCAM are key technological paradigms for enabling a shift of the European automotive sector towards a regained strategic competitiveness. Targeting the resulting need for faster development, deployment and test cycles the Horizon Europe RIA UP2DATE4SDV aims to develop a comprehensive ecosystem for seamless and efficient, safe and secure software updates, hardware upgrades, and situation-dependent reconfigurations of SDVs. For that goal, the UP2DATE4SDV consortium collaborates on the definition and development of two abstraction layers – the hardware abstraction layer and the operating system & middleware abstraction layer – as well as on researching and prototyping a safe and secure orchestration and reconfiguration plane between vehicle and cloud. Based on the resulting modular architecture concept and the corresponding DevOps process the project develops demonstrators to showcase safe and secure updates, upgrades and dynamic task reallocation for automotive hardware and software components. In this paper, we introduce the project, its objectives and planned results, draft first outcomes by refining our demonstrator definitions, and conclude with an outlook into the automotive future based on a safe and secure adaptive SDV stack.

Over-the-air Software Updates (OTASU) in the critical domain are already a reality. OTASU provide huge benefits in terms of user experience, security, and efficiency. However, due to involved risks, safety and security mechanisms and new regulations are needed for their adoption in the critical domain. The automotive industry is already in the race to adopt safe and secure OTASU, as by 2024, compliance to new UN regulations will become compulsory. However, the standards providing the specifications and requirements for OTASU are still in their infancy. Many other dependable system domains, that are now more digital and connected than ever, are following same trends towards OTASU. For instance, OTASU are very likely to be adopted in the railway domain in a near future, as the ability of remotely updating railway equipment considerably reduces maintenance costs and time, improving system availability. This paper describes how the UP2DATE framework adheres to existing and emerging regulations and standards and evaluates them through a railway case-study. Obtained results demonstrate that the proposed updating framework can provide great savings in the installation and maintenance phases of railway signalling devices by reducing the time required for the update and by removing the need for operator presence on-site.

The UP2DATE H2020 project focuses on highperformance heterogeneous embedded platforms for critical systems. We will develop observability and controllability solutions to support online updates while ensuring safety and security for mixed-criticality tasks. In this paper, we describe the rationale behind the selection of the baseline research platforms which will be used to develop and demonstrate the project concepts, including a performance comparison to identify the most efficient one.