Search Results

The need for improved vehicle energy efficiency has increased greatly in recent years along with regulatory fuel economy standards. One key aspect of energy efficiency for both conventional and alternative propulsion vehicles is the energy efficiency of the electrical architecture. In the design of electrical architectures there are several techniques available to increase the energy efficiency. One technique is to manage CAN serial data communication by using Partial Networks. This paper describes a model based approach for simulating the vehicle network behavior when CAN Partial Networking is used as the strategy for need based ECU activation. The simulation results will in turn provide ECU power consumption data to support various electrical architecture design decisions.

In-vehicle electronics is displacing the traditional mechanical interfaces and as a result, electrical architecture design is evolving and getting more complex due to increase in automotive electronic content. Several embedded communication protocols are used to build an electrical architecture, with predominant use of Controlled Area Network (CAN) and Local Interconnection Network (LIN). Demand for new electrical features is increasing, to meet and to exceed the customer expectations and also to adapt to new evolving electronic technologies. To accommodate future electrical content, the need for communication bandwidth is increasing at an exponential rate. In addition, some of the safety-critical features require predictability and deterministic network behavior. Current protocols are not capable of satisfying these demands. FlexRay protocol can address these needs with higher bandwidth and determinism.