Today, cars are becoming complex distributed embedded systems with a proliferation in the number of processing units (PUs), sensors, controllers, and actuators which communicate via a shared bus, e.g., CAN or FlexRay. Due to the distributed nature of processing resources in such in-vehicle networks, control applications are partitioned into a number of tasks which are mapped on the different PUs. Data which is processed by the tasks, e.g., feedback and actuator signals, are packetized as messages which are sent over a shared communication bus according to a specified scheduling policy.

Further, many of the distributed controllers have stringent quality and performance requirements, such as stability and peak overshoot, while the implementation platform demands requirements on the available resources, e.g., bus identifiers and processing capacity. As the control performance depends on certain choices of network parameter values and message priorities, and in turn the choices of scheduler parameters is constraint by the real-time requirements of the control applications, the joint design of control functions along with their distributed implementation platform is a challenging design problem. Hence, we want to account for the semantic gap between the controller models and their actual implementations.

Towards this, our goal is to develop techniques for the joint design of controllers and their implementation architectures, e.g., schedule synthesis and network design for the FlexRay communication protocol, to aid system designers to effectively design control applications with respect to the distributed hardware/software platform under desired control performance constraints.

Contact

Dip Goswami

Reinhard Schneider