CARTRONIC - An Open Architecture for Networking the Control Systems of an Automobile

The car industry has reached a point where electronic systems, which were so far essentially autonomous, begin to grow together to a Car-Wide Web. The main driving force is the demand for more safety, security, and comfort implemented economically. Already various parties are working on control networks. In the long run, vehicle motion and dynamic systems, safety, security, comfort as well as mobile multimedia systems will integrate and reach out for the vision of accident-free, comfortable, and well-informed driving. As a foundation for a Car-Wide Web, Bosch is developing an open architecture called CARTRONIC. The essence of CARTRONIC is to define structuring rules, modeling rules and patterns for total, integrated control of vehicles. The rules and patterns allow the mapping of high-level functions onto several physical implementations, for instance one logical description of functional connections could be created for cars with different equipment packages.