Ideation

Content

The purpose of this project is to standardize a new communication protocol for distributed vehicle Measurement components. That includes data to be recorded as well as status and control information. The goal is to ensure the long-term cost-effectiveness and sustainability of Measurement components. This is achieved by a possible reduction of Specification effort, long-term use of existing components across several vehicle generations, the selective, demand-based expansion of Measurement systems and full scalability of the systems depending on the application. Due to the support of existing, established measuring technology components in the development process, a high stability of the entire measuring system is achieved at an early stage. Update of the proposed Standard will only be required for new types of interfaces or buses.

The working group "Communication Protocol for Distributed Measurement System" concluded that there is no suitable protocol for the data and data-status transfer of distributed Measurement components for use in vehicles. A suitable protocol shall support the following key points:

1.    Supporting scalability of the Measurement setup according to the application.
2.    Enable new Measurement systems for capturing in-vehicle communication data while fulfilling topology constraints.
3.    Support the reusability of already existing Measurement components without the development of complex and expensive new components.
4.    Permit a scalable and cost-effective Measurement solution for common use cases.

This requires the standardization of the following mechanisms:
•    Transporting vehicle data,
•    time-synchronization,
•    control and monitoring,
•    error detection.

Consequently, the working group "Communication Protocol for Distributed Measurement System" recommends the development of a suitable protocol.

Motivation

In today’s Measurement systems, the interfaces for vehicle bus data and sensor data as well as the actual data storage unit are integrated into a single physical housing. However, to achieve higher scalability, these components must be broken down into separate components. On the one hand, the storage unit is ideally easily accessible and supports a removable disk concept. On the other hand, the Measurement interfaces are connected directly to the data sources (LIN, CAN, FlexRay, Ethernet, …) in the vehicle – thus distributed throughout the entire vehicle. This allows to minimize the disturbances on the physics of the vehicle's buses. The number of Measurement interfaces scales with the respective vehicle equipment – from a simple component test rack to a highly automated test car including many sensors.

In addition to the many technical advantages, the economic potentials of a distributed measuring technology system is significant. While dataloggers with removable storage are the main cost factor of the overall system, the capture interfaces can be implemented relatively cost-efficient. Supporting external capture devices connected to dataloggers enables changing capture interfaces over time. The dataloggers including the data-storage and further components are reusable. The overall quality can be improved by reducing the number of datalogger variants. This protocol enables the combination of Measurement components from different vendors. It is easy to adapt the system to support new technologies. In conclusion, this makes the concept future-proof, sustainable and reliable.