Towards Automotive Embedded Systems with Self-X Properties

With self-adaptation and self-organization new paradigms for the management of distributed systems have been introduced. By enhancing the automotive software system with self-X capabilities, e.g. self-healing, self-configuration and self-optimization, the complexity is handled while increasing the flexibility, scalability and dependability of these systems. In this chapter we present an approach for enhancing automotive systems with self-X properties. At first, we discuss the benefits of providing automotive software systems with self-management capabilities and outline concrete use cases. Afterwards, we will discuss requirements and challenges for realizing adaptive automotive embedded systems

Priming letters by colors: evidence for the bidirectionality of grapheme–color synesthesia

In synesthesia, stimulation of one sensory modality leads to a percept in another nonstimulated modality, for example, graphemes trigger an additional color percept in grapheme–color synesthesia, which encompasses the variants letter–color and digit–color synesthesia. Until recently, it was assumed that synesthesia occurs strictly unidirectional: Although the perception of a letter induces a color percept in letter–color synesthetes, they typically do not report that colors trigger the percept of a letter. Recent data on number processing in synesthesia suggest, however, that colors can implicitly elicit numerical representations in digit–color synesthetes, thereby questioning unidirectional models of synesthesia. Using a word fragment completion paradigm in 10 letter–color synesthetes, we show here for the first time that colors can implicitly influence lexical search. Our data provide strong support for a bidirectional nature of grapheme–color synesthesia and, in general, may allude to the mechanisms of cross-modality interactions in the human brain

Constructing Visual Perception of Body Movement with the Motor Cortex

The human brain readily perceives fluent movement from static input. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we investigated brain mechanisms that mediate fluent apparent biological motion (ABM) perception from sequences of body postures. We presented body and nonbody stimuli varying in objective sequence duration and fluency of apparent movement. Three body postures were ordered to produce a fluent (ABC) or a nonfluent (ACB) apparent movement. This enabled us to identify brain areas involved in the perceptual reconstruction of body movement from identical lower-level static input. Participants judged the duration of a rectangle containing body/nonbody sequences, as an implicit measure of movement fluency. For body stimuli, fluent apparent motion sequences produced subjectively longer durations than nonfluent sequences of the same objective duration. This difference was reduced for nonbody stimuli. This body-specific bias in duration perception was associated with increased blood oxygen level-dependent responses in the primary (M1) and supplementary motor areas. Moreover, fluent ABM was associated with increased functional connectivity between M1/SMA and right fusiform body area. We show that perceptual reconstruction of fluent movement from static body postures does not merely enlist areas traditionally associated with visual body processing, but involves cooperative recruitment of motor areas, consistent with a "motor way of seeing"

Towards flexible and dependable E/E-architectures for future vehicles

International audience; Future vehicles are expected to evolve towards enabling fully electric and autonomous driving. However, technically this evolution requires fundamental changes of traditional automotive engineering principles. Specifically, challenges arise for the Electric/Electronic (E/E) vehicle architectures as underlying basis for almost all car functionalities. Higher demands on vehicle system's flexibility and dependability have to be incorporated. We present a novel approach for such future E/E-architectures which considers these requirements as first principles by exploiting runtime adaptation capabilities. Based on use cases, a generic hardware and software architecture is presented which enables technology-independent realization of the provided concepts. Additionally, the incorporated generic failure management and design support are introduced. The approach has been evaluated in different prototype demonstrators, including an e-vehicle prototype compromising enhanced driving functionality. Thereby, the advantages of the concepts for future vehicle E/E-architectural development could be highlighted

Towards Automotive Embedded Systems with Self-X Properties

Since the first pieces of software have been introduced into automobiles in 1976, the complexity of automotive software systems is growing rapidly. Today automotive software is widely installed for diverse applications ranging from the infotainment domain (e.g. entertainment, navigation, etc.) with typically no real-time requirements to safety-critica

Spatial Coding as a Function of Handedness and Responding Hand: Theoretical and Methodological Implications

The Simon effect shows that choice reactions are faster if the location of the stimulus and the response correspond, even when stimulus location is task-irrelevant. The Simon effect raises the question of what factors influence spatial coding. Until now, the effects of handedness, responding hand, and visual field were addressed in separate studies that used bimanual and unimanual tasks, providing inconclusive results. Here we aimed to close this empirical gap by looking at the effects of these variables in the same study. We used a unimanual version of a Simon task with four groups of participants: left-handed and right-handed, responding with the dominant or nondominant hand. Our results show that the Simon effect is substantially reduced in the field of the responding hand for all groups of participants, except for left-handed individuals responding with the left-hand. These findings highlight the importance of attention mechanisms in stimulus-response coding. They reflect that stimulus-response interference is influenced by hierarchical activation of response units. At a practical level, these findings call for a number of methodological considerations (e.g., handedness, responding hand, and visual field) when using stimulus-response conflict to address spatial coding and cognitive control functions in neurological populations

Integrated Timing Analysis in the Model-Driven Design of Automotive Systems *

Abstract. Automotive electronic systems integrate steadily increasing number of functions. Model-driven development of such systems enables to handle their complexity. With the integration of software-components and their intricate interactions ensuring the non-functional behavior, like timing, becomes a crucial matter. Timing analysis allows the validation of these properties but is mostly only loosely integrated with the development process. Therefore, we introduce an integrated approach enabling the iterative timing validation of model-driven designs. It consists of a framework comprising an UML modeling tool and a simulation-based timing analysis tool. By integrating the design models with respective analysis models, the development of timing-accurate designs is enabled. With the example of an automotive infotainment case study we show the applicability of our approach