Controller Area Network (CAN) Simulation of Alternative Vehicle Electronic Architectures 2002-01-1606

The increasing amount of vehicle wiring harness, due to the rise of vehicle electronic contents, results in reliability, assembly and EMC concerns. In order to help ease the problems as well as gaining improved vehicle dynamics, the authors study an alternative networking solution, namely a Vehicle Electronic Architecture with Individual Wheel Control. The concept proposes having an ECU on each wheel, responsible for its combined ABS, suspension and four wheel steering control.

As part of a feasibility study of the proposed architecture, CAN message simulation was made to investigate its associated delay time. The simulation was done on software Simul8, using message load data based on a modern luxury car [1]. Comparison was made between the proposed and several other existing or future vehicle electronic architectures. The results show that under the current level of message load, the message delay time of the proposed architecture, whilst longer than that of the others, is still within limits, which is defined as the data update rate. And the CAN network still has considerable spare capacity.