Merging Model Based System Design With Flexray

Cars rely more and more on electronic systems. Well-known helpers like ABS (Anti Blocking System) or ESP (Electronic Stability Program) have made driving a lot safer. Owing to the fact that centrally controlled systems are very prone to error, the development of distributed systems was started. If these systems are well designed, the failure of a single electronic system does not automatically lead to the breakdown of the whole system.

Communication between these electronic devices is an extremely important part of such a distributed system. The choice of the automotive industry as communication system of the future is FlexRay [1,2]. This deterministic communication system provides all the qualities e.g., fault-tolerance, distributed systems need. The complexity of both FlexRay and distributed systems is very high and has created the demand for a new development flow.

For obvious reasons, MATLAB/Simulink is a good choice in reducing complexity with its easy-to-use graphical blocksets. This software is also very common in the automotive world but does not really cope well with distributed systems. This paper introduces a model based design flow which builds on MATLAB/Simulink and adds specific blocksets for the FlexRay design.