OBA

Problem description

Today, the architecture of vehicle electrical systems is largely an evolutionary process in which new or further developed vehicle electrical/electronic systems are integrated into the design concept, manufacturing concept and logistics concept of existing electrical system architectures from predecessor vehicles. Today's constraints on the development of vehicle electrical system architectures, such as

• the cost pressure on the vehicle electrical system product,
• lack of installation space for the electrics and electronics, with a simultaneous increase in the
• electronics and electrics in vehicles,
• Reduction in consumption, i.e. reduction in the weight of the vehicle electrical system architecture, and
• the decreasing reliability of electrics and electronics due to the ever-increasing
• increasing complexity,

require new methods in the development of vehicle electrical system architectures that consider the electrical system and electrics/electronics as a single unit and thus open the way to a global optimum of the electrical system architecture in contrast to today's methods.

State of the art

Today's methods cannot provide an optimal solution for the above-mentioned problems in the development of an electrical system architecture, since they are limited to the optimization of sub-areas such as

• electronics (control units) or
• the communication of functions among each other or
• the functionality or
• the detailed optimization of the on-board networks are limited to predecessor vehicles.

Aim of the work

The aim of this work is to develop a model of the vehicle electrical system architecture that

• describes the necessary design criteria for hardware, software and on-board network,
• maps the influencing variables
• considers the requirements of the mechatronic vehicle systems
• represents the interactions between environment, mechanics and electronics and
• permits mathematical optimization of the vehicle electrical system architecture.

Idea

The model of the vehicle electrical system architecture may only contain the technically and physically determined design criteria, influencing variables and interactions, so as not to create an image of the current development process and to restrict the optimization method to be selected too much. For the selection of the optimization algorithms a manual investigation of the optimization potential is to be accomplished with the help of the program which can be provided, which contains the model of the wiring system architecture and automated steps with the generation of architecture elements (line routing, control devices, etc.). This is to derive a suitable optimization method using heuristics.

Procedure

The project plan envisages three phases with different functionality of the program for optimizing vehicle wiring system architectures.

• Phase 1: Method for calculating the cost of an on-board network architecture
• Phase 2: Method for generating & cost calculation of an on-board network architecture
• Phase 3: Method for generating & optimization of wiring system architecture