Cost-Effective and Fault Tolerant Vehicle Control Architecture for X-by-Wire Systems (Part 1: Architecture Design Based on the Concept of Autonomous Decentralized Systems)

The X-By-Wire (XBW) is one of the promising technologies for integrated vehicle dynamics control system for the next-generation. The system, in view of ECU architecture, combines multiple ECUs by a high-speed. In this, however, the failure of one ECU leads to system-wide failure. To avoid it, all the ECUs have to be fault tolerant, which is not a realistic solution in terms of cost.

We propose a concept for a cost-effective and fault tolerant vehicle control architecture for real-time and scalable X-by-Wire systems. The concept is based on the Autonomous Decentralized Systems [1][2]. The features of the proposed concept are a shared data-field, self-operation, self-check, and self-backup. The proposed architecture will realize a fault-tolerant system without making all the subsystems fault-tolerant.