Designing FlexRay-based automotive architectures: A holistic OEM approach

FlexRay is likely to become the de-facto standard for upcoming in-vehicle communication. Efficient scheduling of the static and dynamic segment of the communication cycle in combination with the determination of more than 60 parameters that are part of the FlexRay protocol is a challenging task. This paper provides a formal analysis for interdependencies between the parameters as well as a scheduling approach for the static and dynamic segment. Experimental results give evidence of a significant interdependency between the subtasks such that a holistic scheduling approach becomes mandatory to provide high-quality FlexRay schedules. As a solution, this work introduces a complete functional FlexRay scheduling approach that takes parameter selection, allocation of messages to the static and dynamic segment, and concurrent scheduling into account. A real-world case study from the automotive domain gives evidence of efficiency and applicability of the proposed approach.