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Vehicles have greatly changed over the last decades. Originally, they were used as a means of transportation, and their drivers were solely engaged in the driving task. In modern cars the user, ie the former driver, has to interact with many different systems, which provide access to different domains, such as vehicle functions (monitoring speed, fuel consumption), safety related features, comfort and infotainment. Advancements in technologies make it possible to cope with the increasing amount of features, as for example the introduction of input and output modalities that allow new ways of interaction, such as touch (-screens), voice control or gesture recognition. In the end a user has to interact with all systems through the overall user-interface. This requires a high usability and a consistent look and feel in order to provide a consistent user experience.

On the technology side, developers have to cope with rising complexity, dependencies and inter-connections of about 80 different embedded systems in a premium car. The introduction of multi-core systems opened the way for new approaches, like Multi-OS environments. There multiple operating systems are consolidated onto a single hardware platform by the use of hardware/-software virtualization. This allows for example to run real-time operating systems (RTOS) for safety critical cluster applications next to a general purpose operating system (GPOS) for infotainment applications. This also poses new challenges, such as the contradiction between a clear separation meant to reduce complexity, dependencies and to mitigate the risk of interferences, and interconnections that are required to …