Evaluation of electric-vehicle architecture alternatives

As trends in electric-vehicle (EV) research show that with introduction of advanced electric-propulsion systems, ensuring continued safe operation of such automotive system may require high-integrity system design for both hardware and software components. Furthermore, key subsystems must have certain degrees of fault-tolerance capabilities for mitigating potential hazards resulting due to random or systematic failures. With that perspective, this paper describes our proposed approach for developing system-level EV architecture alternatives with different levels of fault-tolerance capabilities and also discusses rationale for design choices and trade-offs. These architectures have been evaluated following the guidelines of the draft ISO 26262 Standard.