A Survey on the Integration of the FlexRay Bus in Distributed Automation and Control Systems

State-of-the-art industrial automation and control systems lack of universal communication technologies in order to handle their increasing engineering complexity. In opposition to the automation and control domain, where different field bus technologies are competing, the automotive domain has identified similar problems, founded a corporate consortium and introduced a new universal bus system. This new bus system is called FlexRay and is supposed to be the successor of CAN and analog bus systems for in-car applications. Similar to the introduction of CAN within the automation domain FlexRay may become the standard for distributed automation and control applications. This paper investigates the FlexRay communication system for its usage in the field of automation and control, by defining scenarios for the beneficial usage of FlexRay and by identifying the advantages and disadvantages compared to current available field bus systems.