Development of a Controller Area Network Interface Unit and Its Application to a Fuel Cell Hybrid Electric Vehicle

In this paper, a CAN-based network interface unit is presented and it is applied to an experimental set-up for studying the timing analysis for the power train control of a fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle. Next generation vehicles like fuel cell electric vehicles usually require a lot of communication data between subsystems or ECUs to improve the fuel economy and the advanced safety. Unexpected transmission delay on a data bus may be a cause for an unstable operation of a vehicle which may also yield a serious result and thus, a simple method for varying controller sampling period is proposed based on holistic scheduling method. It is illustrated by applying the presented interface unit to the simple experimental set-up of a fuel cell hybrid electric vehicle that the transmission delay problem of a lower priority data, which results from the activation of a higher priority task, can be resolved