Load Balancing towards ECU Integration

There has been an exponential increase in the number of electronic components embedded in vehicles. Development processes, techniques and tools have changed to accommodate that evaluation. A wide range of electronic functions such as navigation, adaptive control, infotainment, traffic information, safety system etc are implemented in today’s vehicles. Many of the new functions are not stand alone and hence they need to exchange information, sometimes with stringent time constraints for time critical functions such as engine management, collision warning systems etc. The complexity of the embedded architecture in a vehicle is continually increasing. Today up to 2500 signals are exchanged through up to 70 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) using 5 different buses. This paper introduces the load balancing approach across ECUs supplied by various Tier1 suppliers

A Case Study of the Architecture Business Cycle for an In-Vehicle Software Architecture

This paper presents the theoretical and practical benefits from a case study using a the Architecture Business Cycle to understand the management of software architecture at an automotive manufacturer. The study was done to prepare for architectural changes driven by new technology and in the automotive business environment. Our results show that the architecture business cycle worked well in defining the theoretical context for the study after some modifications; the architecture had to be precisely defined in the interview situation to gain more useful data rather than broad generalisations. Further contributions of the study were a deeper understanding of role of the architecture and it's position among other artefacts in the organisation, and an increased focus on architectural issues in management meetings. The study also indirectly affected a subsequent re-organisation

Managing Complex Data for Electrical/Electronic Components: Challenges and Requirements

In the automotive domain, innovation is driven by the introduction and continuous improvement of electrical and electronic (E/E) components (e.g. sensors, actuators, and electronic control units). This trend is accompanied by increasing complexity and interdependencies between them. In addition, external impact factors (e.g. changes of regulations) demand for management of E/E product data (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is scattered over distributed heterogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases (e.g. consistency of artifacts, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units) are difficult to realize. Consequently, the partial integration of the corresponding application data models becomes necessary. Changes of application data models are common in context of E/E-PDM, but they are not considered by existing application integration approaches. Furthermore, no methodology for creating application integration models exists. This paper elaborates challenges to be tackled when integrating applications containing E/E product data. It further presents properties of the IT landscape involved in E/E-PDM and reveals occurring problems. Finally, requirements for E/E-PDM are discussed

An Architectural Approach to Autonomics and Self-management of Automotive Embedded Electronic Systems

International audienceEmbedded electronic systems in vehicles are of rapidly increasing commercial importance for the automotive industry. While current vehicular embedded systems are extremely limited and static, a more dynamic configurable system would greatly simplify the integration work and increase quality of vehicular systems. This brings in features like separation of concerns, customised software configuration for individual vehicles, seamless connectivity, and plug-and-play capability. Furthermore, such a system can also contribute to increased dependability and resource optimization due to its inherent ability to adjust itself dynamically to changes in software, hardware resources, and environment condition. This paper describes the architectural approach to achieving the goals of dynamically self-configuring automotive embedded electronic systems by the EU research project DySCAS. The architecture solution outlined in this paper captures the application and operational contexts, expected features, middleware services, functions and behaviours, as well as the basic mechanisms and technologies. The paper also covers the architecture conceptualization by presenting the rationale, concerning the architecture structuring, control principles, and deployment concept. In this paper, we also present the adopted architecture V&V strategy and discuss some open issues in regards to the industrial acceptance

Microservice Architectures for Advanced Driver Assistance Systems: A Case-Study

The technological advancements of recent years have steadily increased the complexity of vehicle-internal software systems, and the ongoing development towards autonomous driving will further aggravate this situation. This is leading to a level of complexity that is pushing the limits of existing vehicle software architectures and system designs. By changing the software structure to a service-based architecture, companies in other domains successfully managed the rising complexity and created a more agile and future-oriented development process. This paper presents a case-study investigating the feasibility and possible effects of changing the software architecture for a complex driver assistance function to a microservice architecture. The complete procedure is described, starting with the description of the software-environment and the corresponding requirements, followed by the implementation, and the final testing. In addition, this paper provides a high-level evaluation of the microservice architecture for the automotive use-case. The results show that microservice architectures can reduce complexity and time-consuming process steps and makes the automotive software systems prepared for upcoming challenges as long as the principles of microservice architectures are carefully followed

A battery hardware-in-the-loop setup for concurrent design and evaluation of real-time optimal HEV power management controllers

Razavian, R. S., Azad, N. L., & McPhee, J. (2013). A battery hardware-in-the-loop setup for concurrent design and evaluation of real-time optimal HEV power management controllers. International Journal of Electric and Hybrid Vehicles, 5(3), 177. Final version published by Inderscience Publishers, and available at: https://doi.org/10.1504/IJEHV.2013.057604We have developed a battery hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) setup, which can expedite the design and evaluation of power management controllers for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) in a novel cost- and time-effective manner. The battery dynamics have a significant effect on the HEV power management controller design; therefore, physical batteries are included in the simulation loop for greater simulation fidelity. We use Buckingham's Pi Theorem in the scaled-down battery HIL setup to reduce development and testing efforts, while maintaining the flexibility and fidelity of the control loop. In this paper, usefulness of the setup in parameter identification of a simple control-oriented battery model is shown. The model is then used in the power management controller design, and the real-time performance of the designed controller is tested with the same setup in a realistic control environment. Test results show that the designed controller can accurately capture the dynamics of the real system, from which the assumptions made in its design process can be confidently justified.Financial support for this research has been provided by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), Toyota, and Maplesoft

Simulation of Mixed Critical In-vehicular Networks

Future automotive applications ranging from advanced driver assistance to autonomous driving will largely increase demands on in-vehicular networks. Data flows of high bandwidth or low latency requirements, but in particular many additional communication relations will introduce a new level of complexity to the in-car communication system. It is expected that future communication backbones which interconnect sensors and actuators with ECU in cars will be built on Ethernet technologies. However, signalling from different application domains demands for network services of tailored attributes, including real-time transmission protocols as defined in the TSN Ethernet extensions. These QoS constraints will increase network complexity even further. Event-based simulation is a key technology to master the challenges of an in-car network design. This chapter introduces the domain-specific aspects and simulation models for in-vehicular networks and presents an overview of the car-centric network design process. Starting from a domain specific description language, we cover the corresponding simulation models with their workflows and apply our approach to a related case study for an in-car network of a premium car

On the Integration of Electrical/Electronic Product Data in the Automotive Domain

The recent innovation of modern cars has mainly been driven by the development of new as well as the continuous improvement of existing electrical and electronic (E/E) components, including sensors, actuators, and electronic control units. This trend has been accompanied by an increasing complexity of E/E components and their numerous interdependencies. In addition, external impact factors (e.g., changes of regulations, product innovations) demand for more sophisticated E/E product data management (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is usually scattered over a large number of distributed, heterogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases are difficult to realize (e.g., ensuring the consistency of artifacts corresponding to different development phases, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units). To tackle this challenge, the partial integration of E/E product data as well as corresponding schemas becomes necessary. This paper presents the properties of a typical IT system landscape related to E/E-PDM, reveals challenges emerging in this context, and elicits requirements for E/E-PDM. Based on this, insights into our framework, which targets at the partial integration of E/E product data, are given. Such an integration will foster E/E product data integration and hence contribute to an improved E/E product quality