Paris, France 27 Mai, 2008

CHS is established as a world-leading full-flow design environment for automotive vehicle-level electrical distribution systems, now broadly deployed into the market. This session explores how enabling CHS technologies address the challenges of electrical architecture studies, describing the use case and methodology for exploiting CHS Composite Wiring Synthesis. We will describe how, in optimizing vehicle physical architectures, several scenarios can be processed, input constraints independently flexed and results consolidated and reported in assessing the most suitable architecture, all in the context of a specific company engineering practices.

The role and importance of multiplex networks in automobiles have changed dramatically since it's introduction in the early 1990`s. From being a means of reducing wiring harness cost and weight, it become an essential architectural element of distributed systems. Such systems contain 50-80 Electronic Control Units (ECUs) interconnected by one or more types of networks. Despite this, many of the simple methods introduced during the early days of multiplexing still prevail. The need to properly address the complexity of such systems, their increasing need for bandwidth and robust behavior call for a new approach. This article provides insight into some of the available techniques for design of optimized and reliable automotive network solutions.  

Systems on schedule and on budget. One of the key goals of AUTOSAR is the transferability of software functions (Software Components, SWC) for higher reuse of brand specific software based vehicle features. Means to implement this are the virtual functional bus and the thereby achieved full separation between application software and basic software. The drawback is that the already difficult process of designing the overall communication is made even more complex. This presentation talks about mitigating this problem by utilizing proven network design methods, using a recent pilot project as an example.

Ensuring Robustness of Distributed Automotive Systems through Testing. Utilizing highly efficient processes and complementary comprehensive test tools are in combination essential for delivering the high degree of productivity needed for validating systems with truly high reliability in today’s competitive market. Agilent Technologies, Inc. addresses this need by providing a degree of testing potential never before realizable for configuring and performing comprehensive tests across many distributed system variants.  Enabling the user to automatically reuse defined test parameters and make updates to test reference values based on measured system behavior demonstrates how test configuration time can be dramatically reduced. Combining automatic test procedures further ensure test time is efficiently utilized by automatically identifying and isolating system inconsistencies related to communication timing intervals, data consistency, and application implementation details.

Simulation and validation of the integrated electrical distribution system is a key step towards final design determination. This presentation explains how electrical analysis tools can be used progressively as system integration proceeds. It focuses particularly on topics with a potentially large impact on vehicle electrical reliability, such as avoidance of unintended functions (caused by sneak circuits, for example) and correct over-current protection. New technology that allows CHS Capital Analysis to use the System Vision simulation engine plus underlying VHDL-AMS behaviour models is also described.

The design of an alternator regulator shall take into account the characteristics of the vehicle platform in order to guaranty by design the behaviour of the alternator for current and further configurations. Using the VHDL-AMS within System Vision tool allows to design all models at the appropriate level and to optimize the closed loop parameters.The result is an optimization of the mechatronic system parameters (proportional and/or Integral) even on the first engineering samples (integrated circuit on silicon). This is possible because microelectronics design center use more and more VHDL-AMS shared models. Some examples are presented and illustrated followed by a discussion on the advantages of a multidomain language for automotive design.