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Brake systems are strongly related with safety of vehicles. Therefore a reliable design of the brake system is critical as vehicles operate in a wide range of environmental conditions, fulfilling different security requirements. Particularly, countries with mountainous geography expose vehicles to aggressive variations in altitude and road grade. These variations affect the performance of the brake system. In order to study how these changes affect the brake system, two approaches were considered. The first approach was centered on the development of an analytical model for the longitudinal dynamics of the vehicle during braking maneuvers. This model was developed at system-level, considering the whole vehicle. This allowed the understanding of the relation between the braking force and the altitude and road grade, for different fixed deceleration requirement scenarios. The second approach was focused on the characterization of the vacuum servo operation.

To cope with the increasing number of advanced features (e.g., smart-phone integration and side-blind zone alert.) being deployed in vehicles, automotive manufacturers are designing flexible hardware architectures which can accommodate increasing feature content with as fewer as possible hardware changes so as to keep future costs down. In this paper, we propose a formal and quantitative definition of flexibility, a related methodology and a tool flow aimed at maximizing the flexibility of an automotive hardware architecture with respect to the features that are of greater importance to the designer. We define flexibility as the ability of an architecture to accommodate future changes in features with no changes in hardware (no addition/replacement of processors, buses, or memories). We utilize an optimization framework based on mixed integer linear programming (MILP) which computes the flexibility of the architecture while guaranteeing performance and safety requirements.