Project Goals of the R&D Project Automotive Gateways
Today, electronics is the main innovation driver in the automotive area. More than 90% of innovation in cars are due to electronics and software. Future developments in this domain address the requirements for increased safety, higher environmental efficiency, higher reliability and better comfort. Distributed electronic control units enable the replacement of mechanic and hydraulic solutions whilst increasing the amount of functionality at the same time. The automotive industry, presently, introduces new solutions to cope with the above requirements, e.g., the new bus-protocol FlexRay offers higher bandwidth and more reliability when compared to presently employed solutions. Viennese companies like Decomsys GmbH or TTAutomotive provide leading expertise and development solutions for automotive OEMs.
The project "Automotive Gateways" aims at solutions to provide a smooth migration from present day employed network systems like CAN to FlexRay. A gateway allows the coupling of different bus systems. Hence, it will be possible to relay data from either bus to the other one. Due to the diverging properties of the different employed bus systems, however, an optimal solution requires sound concepts and a thorough evaluation. To that end, the first step of the presented project will develop models for various concepts and evaluate these. After selecting the best suited models, a prototype implementation will provide a feasibility study of the proposed concepts. A thorough experimental evaluation shall testify whether the proposed and implemented concepts provide the desired solution for the above automotive requirements.
The presented project is in line with other projects established by the Research Group Embedded Systems and will strengthen the know-how within the group. The latter is transferred to our students that get involved into the merits of automotive electronics and provide them with an up-to-date education.