FlexRay Redundancy in AUTOSAR - An investigation on how FlexRay redundancy can be integrated into AUTOSAR

Abstract

In the past decades the number of ECUs in vehicles has increased rapidly. With this increase comes a higher demand for high speed networks to interconnect the ECUs as well as higher demand on reliability and safety as electronics handle more and more safety critical applications within the vehicles. In order to meet all these demands the automotive industry has developed a serial communication protocol, FlexRay, which has features that makes it suitable for safety related applications and high-speed networking. The industry has also agreed upon a standard automotive software platform, AUTOSAR, to make software hardware independent, more scalable, more modular and easier to maintain. This report describes an investigation of how the FlexRay redundancy concept can be integrated into the AUTOSAR software architecture as a way to increase the reliability and safety of an electronic system. The chosen solution design has been and implemented in a prototype steer-by-wire system running AUTOSAR 3.1.4. The result shows that it is possible to do this with some minor modifications of the AUTOSAR software architecture. The result also shows that the redundancy related parts in the system introduce an execution time overhead less than 100 percent in the effected parts. The implemented solution should be forward compatible with newer versions with minor or no modifications.