Survey of GenAI for Automotive Software Development: From Requirements to Executable Code
This is an incremental survey that reviews existing GenAI applications for automotive software development, targeting practitioners and researchers in the automotive industry.
This paper surveys the adoption of Generative AI (GenAI) technologies, such as LLMs, RAG, and VLMs, in automotive software development to address lengthy and expensive procedures from requirements to code generation, and it presents a generalized workflow and survey results from industry partners on tool usage.
Adoption of state-of-art Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) aims to revolutionize many industrial areas by reducing the amount of human intervention needed and effort for handling complex underlying processes. Automotive software development is considered to be a significant area for GenAI adoption, taking into account lengthy and expensive procedures, resulting from the amount of requirements and strict standardization. In this paper, we explore the adoption of GenAI for various steps of automotive software development, mainly focusing on requirements handling, compliance aspects and code generation. Three GenAI-related technologies are covered within the state-of-art: Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG), Vision Language Models (VLMs), as well as overview of adopted prompting techniques in case of code generation. Additionally, we also derive a generalized GenAI-aided automotive software development workflow based on our findings from this literature review. Finally, we include a summary of a survey outcome, which was conducted among our automotive industry partners regarding the type of GenAI tools used for their daily work activities.