Safe-by-Wire Plus: Bus Communication for the Occupant Safety System

The occupant safety system in a passenger car includes a steadily increasing number of sensors and actuators that are placed throughout the car. They all need to be electrically connected to one or more control modules. In order to maintain some control on costs it is desirable to reduce the complexity of the wiring by application of a bus system. However, because of unique requirements associated with the occupant safety system, conventional in-vehicle networks like CAN, LIN or FlexRay are not the optimum choice. Consequently an industry consortium has been founded to create a bus standard that specifically targets the challenging requirements of occupant safety systems, but is flexible enough to support various system architectures. This paper discusses the properties of Safe-by-Wire Plus and gives examples of system architectures that are supported.