Thomas Waas

Application and realization of gateways between conventional automotive and IP/ethernet-based networks

In order to fulfill the continuously rising communication demands within vehicles the usage of Ethernet as vehicle network is planned, since it is offering high bandwidth, robustness and has a high market penetration. The automotive industry has strong requirements with respect to safety and reliability; hence the introduction of new technologies is usually done in an evolutionary approach. This implies that for the introduction of Ethernet a gateway to currently existing automotive networking technologies is required for achieving a smooth migration. Within this paper a concept for such a gateway maintaining the Quality of Service (QoS) offered by the existing automotive networks is proposed. In order to support the same level of QoS the usage of Ethernet Audio Video Bridging (AVB) is suggested. The implementation of such a QoS gateway is investigated specifically for the automotive networks MOST and FlexRay. For evaluation of the proposed concepts a validation system was built up, and promising results showing the feasibility of such a QoS gateway have been achieved. Furthermore this implies that AVB has the capability to replace other automotive network technologies in the midterm.

Automotive E/E-architecture enhancements by usage of ethernet TSN

A huge upheaval emerges from the transition to autonomous vehicles in the domain of road vehicles, ongoing with a change in the vehicle architecture. Many sensors and Electronic Control Units are added to the current vehicle architecture and further safety requirements like reliability become even more necessary. In this paper we present a potential evolution of the Electrical/Electronic-Architecture, including a Zone Architecture, to enable future functionality. We reveal the impact on the communication network concerning these architectures and present a potential communication technology to facilitate such architectures.

Sicherheitsherausforderungen in hochverteilten Systemen

Schon seit Langem spielen verteilte IT-Systeme eine entscheidende Rolle in der Datenverarbeitung. Infolge der zunehmenden Vernetzung durch das Internet wurde es in den letzten Jahren moglich, global erreichbare, hochverteilte Systeme zu erschaffen. Durch die rasante Entwicklung derartiger Systeme entstehen einerseits neue Anforderungen an die Performanz (z.B. Leistungsfahigkeit und Bandbreite), wahrend andererseits die steigende Komplexitat von hochverteilten Systemen deren Absicherung (z.B. Datensicherheit und Datenschutz) immer schwieriger gestaltet. Zwei hochaktuelle Beispiele fur hochverteilte Systeme sind Smart Grid und Cloud Computing, die im Folgenden naher betrachtet werden. Smart Grid – Energieinformationsnetzwerke der Zukunft Das intelligente Elektrizitatsnetz (“Smart Grid”) wird langfristig unser heutiges, starres und hierarchisches Stromnetz ablosen. Kernziele des Smart Grid sind die Integration erneuerbarer Energiequellen, eine erhohte Versorgungssicherheit, sowie die Bereitstellung von Infrastrukturen fur eMobilitat unter Berucksichtigung effizienter Verfahren hinsichtlich der Energieverwendung. Zur Realisierung dieser Ziele sind mehrere Schritte notwendig. Als Basis dieser Entwicklung dient die Verflechtung des bisher isolierten Energienetzes mit modernen Kommunikationsinfrastrukturen (vgl. Berl et al. 2013). Dies erlaubt die Integration dezentraler Energieproduktions- (z.B. Photovoltaik) und Energiespeicheranlagen (z.B. Akkumulatoren im Bereich eMobilitat), sowie die Verwendung von intelligenten Stromzahlern („Smart Meter“) und ermoglicht damit eine neue Qualitat des Energiemanagements (z.B. durch Fernwartung und -uberwachung). Neben den entstehenden Chancen durch diese

Software-Based Management for Ethernet Networks

An adequate network management is an essential part for each network permitting to keep the network performance at a suitable level. In this paper, we present our work focusing on an Ethernet network which is used as background interconnection technology for a smart home system in large buildings like tenements or an office block. In this case the network is larger and especially the applications are quite heterogeneous as compared to a private smart home system. Therefore, it is hard to supply a fair and quality of service aware network meeting all the demands. This is especially challenging in the case of an Ethernet network because this technology was intended to use it as a transparent connection system without the feature to support hard quality of service. We present how this problem could be solved by a middleware which best meets the special requirement of the mentioned use case. Finally, we discuss possible design improvements of this solution and present the recent Ethernet standards that could help solve this problem in an alternative way.

Ontologies used in robotics: A survey with an outlook for automated driving

Full autonomy of road vehicles is a major goal of the automotive industry. To reach such high autonomy it is necessary to provide an accurate and comprehensible situation description for the environment and the vehicle itself. A consistent depiction is essential to facilitate data exchange and communication between internal modules, e.g. collision check and environment model, as well as communication with further information sources like traffic participants vehicle to vehicle (V2V) or the infrastructure, e.g. smart traffic lights, road signs or radio traffic service (V2I). One necessary tool to create such a model could be an ontology which represents the given information and its dependencies. Initially this work provides a summary of given approaches in the literature for use of ontologies in robotics in general. Therefore approaches are stated sorted by application and task. Further approaches with focus on autonomous robots and in particular on autonomous vehicles are listed and described. Finally we give an outlook for further research topics in the domain of ontologies.

Comparison of smart grid architectures for monitoring and analyzing power grid data via Modbus and REST

Smart grid, smart metering, electromobility, and the regulation of the power network are keywords of the transition in energy politics. In the future, the power grid will be smart. Based on different works, this article presents a data collection, analyzing, and monitoring software for a reference smart grid. We discuss two possible architectures for collecting data from energy analyzers and analyze their performance with respect to real-time monitoring, load peak analysis, and automated regulation of the power grid. In the first architecture, we analyze the latency, needed bandwidth, and scalability for collecting data over the Modbus TCP/IP protocol and in the second one over a RESTful web service. The analysis results show that the solution with Modbus is more scalable as the one with RESTful web service. However, the performance and scalability of both architectures are sufficient for our reference smart grid and use cases.

Mapping CAN-to-ethernet communication channels within virtualized embedded environments

Intelligent driver assistance systems and new infotainment innovations cause a rapidly growing demand of computing power. To satisfy that demand, the quantity of electronic control units in cars has increased dramatically. OEMs tackle that trend by consolidating software on powerful multicore hardware platforms. However, current software solutions are mostly static and designed to run on limited platforms. As promising operating system for automotive, Linux comes into consideration, which seems to scale better than already existing solutions. To ease the migration process of older software parts and guarantee freedom from interference according to ISO26262 between single software partitions, embedded hypervisors can achieve that requirements. Up to now, automotive systems are not developed to run within virtualized environments. Within this paper, we present an approach to map communication channels of virtual automotive ECUs and connect them with their already existing CAN interfaces. For our analysis, we use the Xen hypervisor. The focus for interaction between virtual machines is to use SocketCAN and given paravirtualized Ethernet drivers. Our goal is a non-intrusive software integration methodology. We keep the source code within software partitions as unmodified as possible. To benchmark our studies, we evaluate our implementation on the Intel i7 and the.