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Generic Remote Software Update for Vehicle ECUs Using a Telematics Device as a Gateway

Exchanging the software in the ECUs during the lifetime of a vehicle will become a mandatory requirement, in order to update the vehicle’s functionality, and to cope with software errors and avoid return calls. Thus, Remote Software Download will become a dominating aspect in the manufacturer’s vehicle maintenance service in the future. Considering the amount of ECUs in the vehicle, a crucial issue is the flash procedure between gateway and ECU. There are many efforts towards standardizing the ECU interfaces and the communication protocols for software download. Nevertheless, this standardization is neither finished nor well-established. In this paper, we propose a very generic and flexible approach for the update of the vehicle’s software using a telematics device as a gateway between the remote download server and the local ECUs within the vehicle. This work has been carried out in the context of the EAST-EEA project within the ITEA research programme funded by the German Government BMBF [2].