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Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

Posted April 13, 2010 7:37 AM

Toyota's recent problems with unintentional acceleration have not only tarnished its image, it could lead to troublesome issues about the automobile industry in general. The industry now relies on dozens of microprocessors to control each vehicle. It is estimated that within five years a typical family car will run 100 million lines of code. Since most people's direct experience with computer code is their PCs, we have to ask, would you bet your life on the code running in your PC? What assurance do we have that the millions of lines of code that govern a car's safety are absolutely safe?

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#1

Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/13/2010 8:03 AM

"...100 million lines of code"

Who estimates? I want a citation or link for that statement!

Does anyone have any idea how much memory would be required just to hold that amount of code?

Sophisticated engineering programs doing complex numeric calculations and CAD packages can be as much as 1 million lines of code. What is a car doing that would require two orders of magnitude of processing?

The most powerful fighter jet in the world, the F-22, only needs 1.7 million lines of code for the full avionics suite!

"Since most people's direct experience with computer code is their PCs, we have to ask, would you bet your life on the code running in your PC?"

There is a huge difference between PC code and life-criticle certified code. People rely on software every day for their lives, whether it is flying in a commercial airplane, traffic lights, trains, or a hospital stay.

This article is misleading and is just fear-mongering (ignoring the preposterous claims).

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#2
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 9:30 AM

Point taken. However, consider that an F-22 is being maintained and operated by highly trained people. Look at what highly trained astronauts did some 200,000 miles from Earth when an explosion disabled their spacecraft (Apollo 13 ?). Would an "average driver" have survived? What fraction of car drivers know how to check their oil and tire pressure? There are literally millions of very young, inexperienced drivers and elderly drivers that panic at the slightest hiccup in their minimal driving experience, never mind what to do with a car out of control on ice, or uncontrollable acceleration or brake failure. Every week it seems there's a news story about an elderly driver who crashed thru a store front or similar "uncontrolled" accident. While thinking about the possibility of a mis-read code line in 2 million lines of code, would a misread in 100,000 lines of code be any safer? Think of the astronauts, strapped into the Shuttle as the main engines and boosters fire, and they're thinking: A hundred thousand parts and 2 million lines of code, all from the lowest bidder..... The automotive industry is known to pressure parts suppliers to constantly reduce costs and selling price. At what point do these cost savings become a fatal liability? How many cargo containers come into the country every day, and what percent are inspected? 1 % ? Another "accident" waiting to happen.

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#4
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 10:04 AM

Even though your "however" is factually correct (mostly), it doesn't support the original posting's exaggeration of the problem by using misinformation to stir up fear.

There is no cited facts to even support the original posting's claim, let alone facts to back up the cause.

We hear about more and more run away cars because it is news and news is a sale-able commodity. Unfortunately, the proportion of stories broadcast does not necessarily mean a correlation to the actual problem. In many cases it is brought on by an uneven distribution of events. In some it is journalistic bias.

The only way to unravel a trend is to do a wide sampling and apply sound statistical principles to real data. At that point you can establish if there is a real problem and the magnitude of the problem. The causes and the fix (if required) are another story.

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#3
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 10:00 AM

Who estimates? I want a citation or link for that statement!

http://spectrum.ieee.org/green-tech/advanced-cars/this-car-runs-on-code:

The avionics system in the F-22 Raptor, the current U.S. Air Force frontline jet fighter, consists of about 1.7 million lines of software code. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, scheduled to become operational in 2010, will require about 5.7 million lines of code to operate its onboard systems. And Boeing's new 787 Dreamliner, scheduled to be delivered to customers in 2010, requires about 6.5 million lines of software code to operate its avionics and onboard support systems.

These are impressive amounts of software, yet if you bought a premium-class automobile recently, "it probably contains close to 100 million lines of software code," says Manfred Broy, a professor of informatics at Technical University, Munich, and a leading expert on software in cars. All that software executes on 70 to 100 microprocessor-based electronic control units (ECUs) networked throughout the body of your car.

Note that the F-22 originated in the early 1990's. Its CPU(s) might well be from the 80486 generation, though upgrades are likely to have occurred during development. (It's impressive how little information has been made public about the jet.)

I too wonder if the article is playing fair with the numbers. You ask a bunch of questions, but the most compelling one is, "What is a car doing that would require two orders of magnitude of processing?"

My guesses are, playing music, interfacing with GPS, driving the DVD player(s), in addition to actually running the car. That can all add up, but heck, I just don't have a good visualization of 100 MSLOC outside of, say, Google.

I think the Toyota experience has revealed that automakers are over-relying on software. With people's lives at stake, the infrastructure to adequately manage all that complexity is probably too expensive and therefore, not existent.

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#15
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/27/2010 8:33 PM

the simple fact is, cars,airplanes & motorcycles are safer now than they ever were.

engines are 10 times as reliable as they were 50 years ago.cars are faster,quieter

& easier to drive. lets give our engineers all the credit they deserve.

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#5
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 10:42 AM

X million lines of code means little. In my experience, that designates lines of "source" code, in a pre-compiled human readable form.

On a well documented software development project one million lines of code may include a quarter million lines of documentation, compiler directives and other extraneous stuff that never makes it onto the microchip.

Without knowing the explicit development system being used, and the programming and documentation parameters in force, it's impossible to quesstimate the size of the operational code.

Hooker

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#6
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 10:58 AM

X million lines of code means little. In my experience, that designates lines of "source" code, in a pre-compiled human readable form.

This belongs in the software forum, hence off-topic.

SLOC count is a crappy, virtually useless metric of software size. But there's not much better! The topic of measuring software is one of active research and navel-gazing, t'were always thus.

One might as well ask how big is the Mona Lisa, and how many Rembrandts are in your car's guts. Not to compare the typical piece of source code to fine art, but there are similarities.

I personally like the idea of comparing executable size, but haven't thought it through to the point of being able to argue forcefully that it's better than anything else.

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#7
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 11:59 AM

I'm not sure why you think it's off topic....the OP mentions how many million lines of code are in automobile electronics. Hooker's statement certainly seems on topic to me.

As far as SLOC goes, I agree it's not a great metric but perhaps better than nothing. I have briefly thought about a composite metric consistenting of SLOC, executable size, memory use, execution time and perhap some other factors.

In the end, does it really matter if it the code is meeting it's requirements (i.e. performing it's function in the required operating environment, in the necessary time)?

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#8
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 12:06 PM

In the end, does it really matter if it the code is meeting it's requirements (i.e. performing it's function in the required operating environment, in the necessary time)?

Not to the developer, but to their bosses and the people who write the checks, it definitely matters. To the user, it matters because if quality isn't controlled, the software can kill us accidentally.

We've got a small group in my organization that is paid to consult about best practices, and one of them is one of the world's foremost authorities on software estimation. He considers a good estimate to be within 20%.

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#9
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 12:28 PM

Don't get me wrong, I wasn't implying that quality isn't necessary, as a matter of fact, I clearly stated that if it's meeting the requirements....I wouldn't expect software failures causing death would be in the 'statement-of-work' unless commissioned by Dr. Evil. Also, meeting the requirements covers budget and schedule as well. I frequently have requirements to design a system in some given period of time with way too little budget. The challenge is to fit within those constraints and still have code that does what's it's supposed to.

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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 12:38 PM

"The challenge is to fit within those constraints and still have code that does what's it's supposed to."

And, perhaps as important if not more so...

Not do what it's not supposed to do.

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#11
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 12:38 PM

If your budget is too small, what does that say for the rest of the project's budget?

If your requirements aren't rigorous enough, it's not enough for your software to meet its stated requirements. You can be a first class software engineer but write great software that executes in a crappy system.

Cheap, on-budget or good: pick two.

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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 12:54 PM

"If your budget is too small, what does that say for the rest of the project's budget? "

Well I don't know about other companies, but my experience has been that during the proposal phase a budget estimate is created from summing up all contributor's estimates for their parts (usually lower level managers....the ones closest to where there work takes place), then senior management decides there's no way to win the contract with that outrageous estimate so they find a way to reduce it to something winnable (but not by reducing what's being promised mind you). Once the contract is awarded (to us) management only distributes 90% or so of the budget as a way to challenge the team.

As a group leader, I once bid 2000 hours on a job, it was cut in half by the time it went to our customer, and with my 90%, I had 900 hours to actually do the job. In the end I did it in 1800 hours and was criticized for going 100% over-budget.

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#13
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/14/2010 1:17 PM

Been there, done that, as has anyone who's done engineering for more than a year or so. I'm wondering whether I already covered this in the tome I wrote to the defense & security section yesterday, or if I need to add it.

What you describe is the stupid nature of the stupid beast. I think it sort-of falls under "[Our commercial system] does not reward under-promising and over-delivering. If your group provides more system with less dollars, your next budget is adjusted DOWNWARD."

What do you think?

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#14
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Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

04/15/2010 7:44 AM

Yes, I've always thought it odd to have budgets continuously cut 10% year after year. But viewing from the other side, if I'm able to achieve that and still produce the same quality or at least acceptable quality, then that means my company should be able to win more work.

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#16

Re: Why Worry About Automobile Electronics?

05/20/2010 4:03 PM

If my PC can get a virus that ok! But if my cars breaking system gets a virus who you

gonna call on that cell phone while you are accelerating. Its a problematic situation

perhaps of stick/slip and electronics overheating due to friction and the mems getting

a virus, but who needs this problem when its time to stop. We might need to return to old school auto philosophy when its time to study the breaks and breaking problems.

rwengin

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