automotive software developers

Abstract: As general-purpose LLM agent harnesses mature, organizations must decide whether to continue developing in-house systems or adopt existing alternatives. We study this decision at Volvo Group for GUI testing of Android-based in-vehicle infotainment (IVI) systems. We compare a production, custom-built harness with two general-purpose harnesses, Claude Code and OpenCode, keeping the tools, accessed through the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and the models the same. We evaluate the harnesses with up to four models on Volvo's IVI test cases and on open-ended tasks in public apps (Google Maps, Booking.com), and interview ten practitioners: developers, the product owner, and testers. On Volvo's stepwise IVI tests, general-purpose harnesses match the custom-built harness in success but vary more across runs. Their inference cost per task is 2.6-10.7 times higher, yet the engineering effort they save outweighs this: for a nightly IVI regression suite, total monthly cost, including engineering effort and inference, is 3-66% lower. On open-ended public-app tasks, they succeed more often, mainly because they recover better from incorrect actions. Interviews suggest that external advances can turn an in-house harness into technical debt even without deterioration. Adopting a general-purpose harness shifts maintenance from the agent loop to tools and instructions, but gives teams less control over what the model receives. Regardless of the harness, testers want to inspect the agent's actions and ensure that it follows the prescribed test scenario.

Abstract: This paper explores the potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to enable end-to-end automotive design and software development for Software-Defined Vehicles (SDVs). Based on our contributions within the Central Car Server (CeCaS) and follow-up EU-funded projects, we present an AI-driven toolchain integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) to automate the transformation of natural-language requirements into system architectures, executable software, and validation artifacts. The approach emphasizes traceability, consistency, and compliance with safety-critical automotive development requirements. Validation is performed on a centralized vehicle computing platform supporting adaptive cruise control and emergency braking, tested in Hardware-in-the-Loop (HiL) and Software-in-the-Loop (SiL) environments. We discuss current capabilities, practical limitations, and future directions toward increasingly automated, reliable, and quality-assured automotive software development with minimal human intervention.

Abstract: Over-the-air (OTA) updates for Cyber-Physical Systems (CPS) allow engineers to modify their software wirelessly. In the automotive domain, they enable manufacturers to update software without physical access to the vehicle. However, OTA updates can generate a large number of possible software configurations. For example, end users may decide whether or not to install any given OTA updates. The combinatorial explosion of these configurations hampers SW testing, a standard practice for detecting errors in CPS. To overcome this limitation, we propose CRISP (CRIticality-based Selection and Prioritization), a novel framework supporting test case prioritization and selection in the context of OTA updates. Our framework leverages test case robustness, i.e., how far they are from violating the system requirements, to drive test case prioritization and selection. It enables engineers to rank test case executions from most to least critical, and to select only the critical test cases relevant to a given OTA update. We evaluated our approach using a representative SW product line consisting of seven different vehicles, 22 driving scenarios, and two software components. We considered 224 tests, requiring 59 hours of execution time. We assessed the effectiveness of CRISP across five OTA updates. We compared our solution with (a) a random test case prioritization and selection algorithm, and (b) AP-DISC, identified as the state-of-the-art solution in a recent empirical study on the subject. Our results show that CRISP outperforms our baselines in finding failure-revealing test cases, and that our selection procedure can be configured to find reasonable and practical tradeoffs among accuracy (percentage of failure-revealing test cases identified) and computational time (time required to find them).

Abstract: Traffic efficiency and air pollutants are major issues in urban transport systems, as they are critical points for traffic flows and people living in urban areas, respectively. In response to this challenge, connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have garnered increasing attention, with the potential to address the above challenges through cooperative maneuvering and real-time communication. In this paper, we consider an intersection served by a multi-access edge computing (MEC) where CAVs communicate with a controller to pass the intersection without the need of signals and without stopping unless in presence of heavy congestion. For this purpose, we propose a first-in-first-scheduled (FIFS) algorithm, and we specify the communication protocol for its practical implementation. The solution is validated through simulations with varying traffic densities, showing that it provides significant gains in travel time and emissions compared to both uncontrolled intersections, with or without traffic lights, and a benchmark solution derived from the literature.

Abstract: Most federated learning frameworks for vehicular ad hoc networks assume that all vehicles collaboratively train a single model for a common task. This assumption limits their applicability to practical vehicular environments, where vehicles may perform heterogeneous but related perception tasks with different output spaces. This paper proposes encoder-sharing hierarchical multi-task federated learning (EN-HMTFL), which integrates cluster-based hierarchical federated learning with a globally shared encoder and vehicle-local decoders. EN-HMTFL enables vehicles performing different tasks to collaboratively learn a transferable feature representation while preserving their task-specific models locally. Only the encoder is exchanged and aggregated through the hierarchy, whereas raw data and local decoder parameters remain at the vehicles. The proposed framework is evaluated on the MNIST and GTSRB datasets in different vehicular scenarios. Across the evaluated scenarios, EN-HMTFL improves accuracy by up to 24.0% relative to the compared representation-sharing benchmark. In scenarios where EN-HMTFL converges earlier, the reduction reaches up to 69 communication rounds (28.8%).

Abstract: Local feature matching, which associates keypoints in two images as keypoint pairs, is fundamental to Visual Simultaneous Localization and Mapping (Visual SLAM). Nearest Neighbor (NN) search is commonly used for keypoint matching, but it has difficulty selecting correct keypoint pairs when multiple candidates have similar costs. To improve matching accuracy, this paper proposes a keypoint matching method that considers the pairwise co-occurrence of two keypoint pairs. The keypoint matching is formulated as a quadratic assignment problem, which is an NP-hard combinatorial optimization problem, making it difficult to solve quickly on conventional computers. Recently, Ising machines have been developed as computing devices capable of solving hard combinatorial optimization problems. Using a simulated bifurcation based Ising machine, the proposed method improved matching accuracy by approximately 8 percentage points over a conventional method on the HPatches dataset. Furthermore, we integrated the proposed method into ORB-SLAM3, a representative academic Visual SLAM system, and achieved a 3.78-fold improvement in absolute pose error (APE) and a 2.85-fold improvement in relative pose error (RPE) on the KITTI dataset scenes where multiple same shape objects are repeatedly arranged, which are challenging for accurate self-pose estimation by the original ORB-SLAM3.

Abstract: An agentic AI driver-assistance framework that integrates perception, compliance reasoning, vehicle-state interpretation, and safety arbitration into a modular and auditable pipeline. The architecture, referred to as DriveMCP, incorporates a sensor-like perception stack alongside DriveLM as the vision-language front end to generate a graph-structured scene understanding (Graph Visual Question Answering) and language-grounded driving information. Key compliance elements in world_state, including posted speed limits and jurisdiction cues, are derived from DriveLM outputs through a structured parsing layer rather than being injected as simulator ground truth. A stateful orchestration layer coordinates specialized experts exposed as Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers: (i) a Rules server that performs retrieval-augmented compliance reasoning over jurisdiction-specific traffic codes and sign conventions, (ii) a Weather server that estimates traction risk and contextual speed advisories, and (iii) an MCP-CAN server that surfaces Controller Area Network (CAN)/On-Board Diagnostics (OBD) telemetry and diagnostic context for health-aware risk shaping. These outputs are fused to generate a structured decision that prompts a recommended course of action. The outcome is then further filtered by a Responsibility-Sensitive Safety (RSS)-inspired guardrail that arbitrates speak versus act decisions under bounded online adaptation. In CARLA simulation across multilingual, cross-border, and dynamic speed-limit scenarios, DriveMCP reduces traffic infractions and overspeed relative to the VLM-Direct, VLM-Direct+RAG, and VLM-Tools-NoArbiter baselines, while improving hazard response time and maintaining sub-second advisory latency.