COMPUTING ARCHITECTURE FOR VEHICLE HARDWARE AND FEATURE VIRTUALIZATION

A vehicle computing architecture includes an application layer a software virtualization layer, a hardware virtualization layer, and a hardware component layer. The application layer includes a plurality of virtual functional components each representing a virtual function. The software virtualization layer includes a command registry having virtual commands. The hardware virtualization layer includes mapping logic. The hardware component layer includes a plurality of physical nodes each being a virtual representation of a corresponding hardware component. The virtual functional components call a virtual command from the command registry. The hardware virtualization layer selects one of the physical nodes corresponding to the received virtual command and translates the received virtual command to a hardware command using the mapping logic, and communicates the hardware command to the selected physical node. The hardware component layer communicates the hardware command to the hardware component to perform the corresponding vehicle function.