Systematic Message Schedule Construction for Time-Triggered CAN

The most widely used standard for in-vehicle communication networks that interconnect electronic control units is the controller area network (CAN). However, the event-triggered architecture of CAN introduces several issues, such as predictability, signal jitter, and reliability. Different time-triggered networks are being developed to address these issues. In this paper, we focus on time-triggered CAN (TTCAN), which achieves time-triggered behavior by implementing time-division multiple access on the existing CAN network standard. The main task is thus to construct a message schedule for a given set of messages while fulfilling certain performance criteria. To this end, we provide a formal framework for the construction of feasible message schedules in TTCAN networks by considering several performance metrics, such as bandwidth utilization and jitter, as well as the hardware constraints of the TTCAN controller specification.