Evaluation of Automotive OTA Updates Using Assurance Cases

Software-intensive vehicles require regular over-the-air (OTA) updates. To ensure that OTA updates do not compromise system safety, such updates should be assured. Automotive safety engineers need to efficiently estimate the effort it would take to assure these updates for the entire fleet. To address this challenge, we propose a process for supporting assurance of OTA updates. Our process proposes to model the fleet of vehicles as a software product line (SPL), assured with a variability-aware assurance case. It then measures the difficulty of assuring the proposed update using this variability-aware AC model via a set of heuristics.