F2010B090
An Evaluation of the FlexRay-CAN Gateway-Embedded System in the HEV Test Bench
Multiple electronic control units are deployed in a vehicle to achieve high performance and sophisticated functions. The increase in the number of ECUs has increased the complexity of automotive networks. In addition, in-vehicle networks consist of heterogeneous protocols such as local interconnect network (LIN), controller area networks (CAN), and FlexRay. Currently, CAN is used as the primary in-vehicle network in the automotive industry. It enables any device to communicate and operate with other devices in a network without placing a great burden on the bus. Such communication is ideal for powertrain and body electronic applications. However, the introduction of advanced control systems, which employ a number of sensors, actuators, and ECUs, has begun to place boundary demands on the existing CAN communications bus commonly used in most automobiles. As a result, initiatives by automobile manufacturers and suppliers have led to the creation of FlexRay. This is an open standard for a new deterministic, fault-tolerant, and high-speed bus system. FlexRay is a new network communication system targeted specifically at next generation automotive applications or "by-wire" applications. By-wire applications require high-speed bus systems that are deterministic, fault-tolerant and capable of supporting distributed control systems. However, LIN is still widely used, as it represents a cheaper option. Here, gateway systems are becoming more important because they enable seamless communication between heterogeneous networks. The role of a gateway is not complex, but the gateway may have an infectious potential to damage the operation of other connected ECUs and networks. Exchanging information between heterogeneous networks has a high probability of error, due to different protocol specifications, such as baud rates, message frame formats, and transmission latencies. If multiple ECUs are able to reliably exchange information with each other, the performance of vehicles will be significantly improved.
In this paper, we propose a reliable gateway-embedded system based on the OSEK operating system (OS) and network management (NM) and deploy the gateway system in the hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) bench tester. The proposed gateway exchanges information (e.g. messages) between the LIN, CAN, and FlexRay networks. The gateway monitors all of networked nodes using OSEK NM to minimize unnecessary re-transmission of messages. Then faulty nodes are exported from the routing table. The nodes cannot receive any more messages prior to recovery, because a CAN uses sophisticated error detection and re-transmits faulty messages. We deploy the developed gateway-embedded system to the HEV bench tester to evaluate the developed gateway-embedded system.
This abstract is supplemented by a PDF, which can be viewed here.
Poster presentation: Vehicle design and development