Schedule Integration Framework for Time-Triggered Automotive Architectures

Automotive Electrical/Electronic (E/E)-architectures consist of various components which are generally developed indepen-dently. Due to the increasing size and complexity, compo-nent integration is highly challenging and already slight mod-ifications to components or subsystems often require expen-sive re-testing and re-validation. As a remedy, we propose a framework for modular architectures based on a data-centric description and a fully time-triggered scheduling. This mod-ular design approach is enabled by a novel methodology for schedule integration where local schedules are defined inde-pendently for subsystems before being integrated into a global schedule. This divide-and-conquer approach significantly re-duces the integration complexity while the system becomes highly composable. Our experimental results give evidence of the efficiency and versatility of the proposed approach, using networks based on a time-triggered automotive Ethernet. 1