Efficiency evaluation of a time-triggered architecture for vehicle body-electronics

The growing demand for more comfort and safety as well as less energy consumption of vehicles has lead to intractable complexity, wiring harness and high cost of vehicle body electronic systems. To cope with these problems, a time triggered architecture based on TTP/A (time triggered protocol for automotive applications) has been developed. This architecture provides timeliness, predictability, composability and implicit process synchronization. The paper describes the time triggered architecture as the basis for a distributed vehicle light control system in a test stand. In this test environment TTP/A is evaluated with respect to memory requirements, CPU utilization, and response times. The resulting parameters of TTP/A are compared to the parameters of an event triggered system for the same application. The paper shows that a time triggered solution, which provides the advantages mentioned above, can compete with an event triggered system in the area of vehicle body electronics.