The modern automotive industry field is in the middle of a huge transformation of the Electric & Electronics (E/E) system design in order to meet the future mobility trends: driven by autonomy, electrification and connectivity.
Autonomy (as defined by SAE J3016) implies five levels of driving automation and will include an explosion of sensors and computing power. As well, functional safety and cybersecurity constraints will increase. Electrification implies replacing energy from thermal sources with electricity from the wall and will include enhanced integration between sub-systems and components, along with higher speed in real time controls. Connectivity will provide huge data mining capability, along with enhanced off-board communication (so-called “Vehicle-to-Everything” or V2X) and remote software updates (FOTA).
For those reasons, the ongoing industry trend is to move to more centralized E/E architectures by combining and integrating sub-systems and controllers, from either a functional domain standpoint (horizontal integration, or cross-domain controllers) or a geographical zone standpoint (vertical integration, or central brain with zones).
More specifically, one step in this technological journey is the Cross-Domain controller and will be explored in this paper, describing the control architecture for a supervisory controller hosting all high-level functional logics to control vehicle motion (both Propulsion and Chassis), so-called Vehicle Domain Control Module (VDCM) and implemented in some Stellantis products.
The expected benefits of moving to a cross-domain control concept are:
Enhanced integration between Propulsion and Chassis functionalities, especially in electrified vehicles
Combination of all torque supervisory functions from conventional engine controls, electrified controls and active chassis controls in order to comprehensively manage the primary vehicle dynamics (longitudinal, lateral, vertical)
Reduced interdependency between stand-alone modules (that will become smart actuators ECUs managing physical components and their specific I/O)
Improved overall vehicle performance, by reduced latency
Reduced implementation and calibration variants, by maximized software re-use
Improved scalability between vehicle platforms, and reduced time to market
Expected development and warranty costs saving