Service-oriented architectures enabling future vehicle lighting

This paper explores the transformation of vehicle lighting systems through the adoption of service-oriented architectures (SOA). Traditional monolithic software designs, tightly bound to distributed Electrical/Electronic (E/E) architectures, limit scalability and increase development complexity. By modularizing lighting functions into microservices and deploying them on centralized computing platforms, significant benefits in flexibility, reusability, and maintainability can be achieved. A functional classification of lighting services is introduced, covering Aesthetic, Informative, Mandatory, and Entertainment categories. Key use cases include Vehicle-to-Everything (V2X)-adaptive low beam control and topology-dependent levelling. These examples illustrate how lighting features can be independently developed, updated, and deployed across vehicle platforms using standardized APIs and Continuous Integration / Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines. The proposed approach enables faster innovation cycles, supports post-SOP feature upgrades, and reduces system-level integration efforts. Ultimately, it positions exterior lighting as a fully integrated component within the software-defined vehicle (SDV) ecosystem.