FlexRay schedule optimization of the static segment

Abstract

The FlexRay bus is the prospective automotive standard communication system. For the sake of a high exibility, the protocol includes a static time-triggered and a dynamic event-triggered segment. This paper is dedicated to the scheduling of the static segment in compliance with the automotive-specific AUTOSAR standard. For the determination of an optimal schedule in terms of the number of used slots, a fast greedy heuristic as well as a complete approach based on Integer Linear Programming are presented. For this purpose, a scheme for the transformation of the scheduling problem into a bin packing problem is proposed. Moreover, a metric and optimization method for the extensibility of partially used slots is introduced. Finally, the provided experimental results give evidence of the benefits of the proposed methods. On a realistic case study, the proposed methods are capable of obtaining better results in a significantly smaller amount of time compared to a commercial tool. Additionally, the experimental results provide a case study on incremental scheduling, a scalability analysis, an exploration use case, and an additional test case to emphasis the robustness and exibility of the proposed methods.