Development of a Distributed Processing System for Automotive Applications

Distributed Computing systems consist of several processors that interact and cooperate with each other by message passing. These distributed systems provide many attractive features such as fault tolerance, resource sharing, high reliability and high throughput. These features make distributed systems good candidates for many real time applications such as aircraft, space crafts and automotive control.

Car Industry is striving to provide reliable and cost effective Computing systems for their automobiles. As the number of processors increases in a vehicle, the demand increases to provide a reliable Computing system for the automotive. Therefore, it is important to develop specialized distributed Computing systems for this type of applications taking into consideration reliability as well as cost of the system. In this paper, a distributed Computing system architecture has been proposed for automotive applications. The sensors and actuators have been divided into groups according to their locations. Each sensor/actuator group is controlled by a dedicated controller that uses basic-CAN interface for serial communication. As a result, any of the sensor/actuator group is accessible by any processor in the system; consequently, if any processor becomes faulty, any other processor in the system may implement its function, and thus the system will continue to function even though half of the processors are operating under faulty conditions. The multiplexed sensors and actuators have been incorporated in the proposed architecture to reduce wiring harness in the system. Reliability modeling of the proposed distributed system has been developed.