An In-Vehicle Infotainment Software Architecture Based on Google Android

The automotive infotainment industry is currently pressured with many challenges. Tier-one manufactures must accommodate disparate and quickly changing features for different carmakers. Moreover, the use of a dedicated platform for each brand and model is no more viable. The use of an open platform would permit sharing costs across the whole customer spectrum, and it will allow products to grow and adapt to the user preferences, by providing the possibility of executing third-party applications. Google Android is a recent operating system, designed for mobile devices that perfectly fits to embedded devices such as those used for automotive infotainment. In this paper we present a proof-of-concept architecture developed in cooperation between Magneti Marelli and Politecnico di Torino, whose main contribution is an automotive-oriented extension of Google Android that provides features for combining extendibility and safety requirements.