Consortium promotes control applications
Greg Reed, Contributing Technical Editor -- Test & Measurement World, 6/1/2005
With the goal of developing an advanced communication system for automotive applications, several firms have joined forces to form the FlexRay Consortium. Members include BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Motorola, and Philips. Another member is TTTech Computertechnik, a Vienna-based supplier of time-triggered systems.
Dr. Markus Plankensteiner, marketing director at TTTech Computertechnik, serves as a development member within the FlexRay Consortium. I recently asked him about the consortium and about his company's involvement with it.
Q: What is the FlexRay Consortium?
A: An alliance of automotive, semiconductor, and electronic systems manufacturers. These companies are working to develop a deterministic and fault-tolerant bus system with high data rates for advanced automotive control applications. The consortium was formed to drive the adoption of the FlexRay communication system as the de facto standard for high-speed communication networks for automotive applications.
The consortium intends to create an industry standard for serial communication systems to efficiently support the control of communication between electromechanical nodes in automotive applications. The adoption of FlexRay will simplify the manufacture, design, and testing of vehicles and enable the development of advanced electronic systems that will become an integral part of next-generation vehicles.
Q: Explain TTAutomotive's role within FlexRay.
A: TTAutomotive [a TTTech Computertechnik subsidiary] will provide development tools, middleware, and prototyping hardware as well as services and engineering support for customer projects in the automotive industry. The company's mission is to advance the implementation of time-triggered technology in the automotive industry.
Q: Which systems are primary candidates for time-triggered technology?
A: Time-triggered architecture (TTA) is an appropriate solution for fault-tolerant and hard real-time distributed systems. In the automotive industry, this encompasses most advanced distributed driving and vehicle control functions, such as steering or braking by wire, and stability and chassis control algorithms that combine current stability functions such as ABS and ESP. Systems in the aerospace industry that apply time-triggered technology include engine control, fly-by-wire, and cabin pressure control. Time-triggered protocols (TTPs) can transmit 10 or even 20 times more application data than a single CAN link or a comparable aerospace ARINC 429 network.
Q: What are the primary challenges to implementation?
A: Aerospace engineers typically are familiar with the concept of safety by redundancy and with time-triggered scheduled communication systems. Challenges include restricting the function design to periodic activities and the mapping of event-based functions to periodic functions.
Another challenge is the redesigning of soft-real-time functions as hard-real-time functions in order to map them to hard-real-time time-triggered networks. Also, the use of asynchronous or nonperiodic interrupt service functions for application processing has to be reduced or eliminated. The problem of managing the higher complexity and computation effort that comes with the higher data throughput without losing comprehensibility of software is met by already available standardized software layers.
