David Philipp Klüner

Richard Schubert, Marvin Loba, Alexander Blödel et al.

This paper presents a process for coordinating stakeholders in their consideration of performance indicators and respective interface requirements for automated vehicles. These performance indicators are obtained and processed based on the system's self-perception and enable the realization of self-aware and self-adaptive vehicles. This is necessary to allow SAE Level 4 vehicles to handle external disturbances as well as internal degradations and failures at runtime. Without such a systematic process for stakeholder coordination, architectural decisions on realizing self-perception become untraceable and effective communication between stakeholders may be compromised. Our process-oriented approach includes necessary ingredients, steps, and artifacts that explicitly address stakeholder communication, traceability, and knowledge transfer through clear documentation. Our approach is based on the experience gained from applying the process in the autotech.agil project, from which we further present lessons learned, identified gaps, and steps for future work.

David Philipp Klüner, David Murach, Stefan Kowalewski et al.

In this paper, we introduce and evaluate Selective Field Transmission (SFT), a middleware mechanism that decouples transmission content from statically defined message types in publish-subscribe systems. Industrial and robotics developers often face a dilemma: They can follow established best practices and use standard message types, such as in the Robot Operating System 2 (ROS 2) and COVESA projects, to benefit from reusable and interoperable interfaces, or they can introduce proprietary, project-specific message types tailored to receiver requirements to reduce bandwidth. SFT resolves this trade-off by dynamically adapting the transmitted message components to each receivers actual needs while preserving unmodified standard interfaces. Receivers declare or automatically derive the required message components, which are communicated to the publisher. The publisher then serializes and transmits only the required component subset per receiver with minimal developer intervention. Our evaluation shows that SFT achieves significant bandwidth reductions without measurable per-message latency overhead, with savings proportional to the number and size of unused fields.

David Philipp Klüner, Stefan Kowalewski, Alexandru Kampmann

In this paper, we propose three extensions to the Real-Time Publish Subscribe wire protocol, on which Data Distribution Service (DDS) is based, to improve bandwidth efficiency. First, a stream negotiation mechanism exchanges static header information during discovery, replacing the full RTPS header at runtime with a compact 2 B identifier. Second, a payload aggregation scheme aggregates samples for the same locator into single UDP packets, reducing IP and UDP header costs. Third, a predictive heartbeat suppression strategy reduces control traffic by omitting heartbeats for periodic communication patterns, falling back upon detected loss or timing violations. All three mechanisms preserve Real-Time Publish Subscribe(RTPS) compatibility by extending DDS discovery to activate these features when supported. Experimental results show that stream headers reduce bandwidth consumption by up to 27.9 % compared to conventional RTPS under best-effort transport, and that heartbeat suppression yields a further 22.7 % reduction on top of stream headers under reliable transport, while preserving transmission latency in both cases.

Lucas Hegerath, David Philipp Klüner, Philipp Pelcz et al.

In software-defined vehicles, automotive middleware plays a fundamental role in enabling efficient communication, integration, and coordination among software components. This paper examines how well two of the currently most popular middleware frameworks, ROS 2 Jazzy and AUTOSAR Adaptive Platform R24-11, meet practical requirements elicited from automotive software engineers at one of the major automotive supplier companies, ZF Group. Our objective is to provide insight into an otherwise difficult-to-obtain industrial perspective and support a clearer understanding of priorities in the development and evaluation of middleware for automotive applications.