Software is disrupting one industry after another. Currently, the automotive industry is under pressure to innovate in the area of software. New, innovative approaches to vehicles and their HW/SW architectures are required and are currently subsumed under the term “SW-defined vehicle”. However, this trend does not stop at the vehicle boundaries, but also includes communication with off-board edge and cloud services. Thinking it through further, this leads to a breakthrough technology we call “Reliable Distributed Systems”, which enables the operation of vehicles where time and safety-critical sensing and computing tasks are no longer tied to the vehicle, but can be shifted into an edge-cloud continuum.

RDS is the basis for a paradigm shift in the way intelligent and autonomous systems are built in future. Automated driving, for example, is currently mostly thought of from the ego perspective of each individual vehicle. RDS enables us to shift to a bird’s eye view - a collaborative perspective - as it allows information from individual systems to be reliably fused into a real-time distributed world model enabling better and more intelligent decisions.

Reliable distributed systems are not limited to automotive use-cases. The ubiquitous and reliable availability of distributed computing and sensing in real-time enable novel applications and system architectures in a variety of domains: from industrial automation over building automation to consumer robotics.

Insights in current activities of Bosch Research and its academic partners to move towards this vision will be provided.