Moving Design Automation of Networked Systems to Early Vehicle Level Design Stages

Networked systems in automobiles and aircraft are designed by groups of people, departments and/or companies of different expertise. Commonly used design methodologies in complex system design partition the work at high level of uncertainty into teams of specialists. These teams have to make assumptions and design decisions without being able to evaluate the impact of their decisions on the overall design. Many design decisions have to be made during integration. This design methodology does not permit optimization at vehicle level and results in very low probabilities of not having critical design errors [1]. Hence it causes high integration costs and redesigns.

This paper shows why the current design methodologies cause unverified designs and critical errors, and how system level design automation technologies can be extended to early vehicle level design stages for verifiable vehicle level executable specifications and architectural optimization at vehicle level. Using extensions of the integrated design tool MLDesigner©, the developed design methodology is demonstrated for examples executable specifications of vehicle power management and power train. In an example of vehicle level architecture optimization cable length is reduced by two third and system availability improved by several orders of magnitude.