A framework for health monitoring of automotive electrical and electronic control systems (poster)

The automotive industry has seen enormous growth in the size and complexity of electrical and electronic system architectures. As complexity increases the problem of diagnosing faults in a vehicle's electrical and electronic systems is becoming increasingly difficult. Many faults are as a result of system-level disturbances or interactions that are difficult to interpret and diagnose using existing component-level diagnostics which have been traditionally focused on mechanical system diagnostics. The problem of rising complexity is exacerbated by increasing in-service warranty periods with some automotive OEMs now offering 5 or 7 year, or even `life-time' warranties. This paper discusses the need for a new system-level approach to the management of faults in a vehicle's networked electronic systems and how this might be achieved by using the data that flows over a vehicle's data networks. This paper compares different industry approaches to system-level health monitoring of complex distributed computing environments and presents a proposal for the application of health monitoring to an automotive electrical and electronic architecture.