A importância das redes de comunicação industriais em modernos sistemas de automação e controle industriais tem aumentado significativamente nos últimos anos, devido aos avanços nas áreas de processadores e softwares embarcados, que permitem o desenvolvimento de dispositivos com elevada capacidade de processamento a custos reduzidos. Estas características também são muito importantes em sistemas automotivos, visto que existe uma tendência para a substituição de sistemas mecânicos e hidráulicos em veículos e o espaço disponível para implementação é bastante reduzido. Esta substituição passa pela elaboração de complexos algoritmos de controle, os quais, quando operam sobre uma rede de comunicação, precisam considerar explicitamente os efeitos do canal de comunicação compartilhado na dinâmica do sistema em malha fechada. Este trabalho apresenta uma análise do impacto da comunicação em rede sobre sistemas de controle. Mais especificamente, analisa-se o comportamento do protocolo Flexray, recentemente desenvolvido por um consórcio de importantes empresas e que incorpora interessantes conceitos para escalonamento de mensagens síncronas e assíncronas. No trabalho foram realizados experimentos com três diferentes tipos de controladores aplicados ao estudo de caso de uma suspensão ativa, onde o sistema tem sua malha fechada sobre a rede FlexRay. / The importance of communication networks on modern automation systems has increased significantly over the last years, mostly due to advances in embedded microprocessor and software technologies, which enable the development of devices with high processing power at reduced costs. These characteristics are very important for vehicle systems, since there is nowadays a trend to replace mechanical and hydraulic systems, and the space available for implementation is limited. This replacement requires very complex control algorithms, which, when operating on a communication network, have to consider explicitly the effects introduced by the shared communication channel on the closed loop system dynamics. This work presents an analysis of the network communication impact over control systems. More specifically, it is of interest to analyse the behavior of the FlexRay protocol, which has been recently developed by a Consortium of important companies and incorporates interesting concepts of synchronous and asynchronous message scheduling. In this work, some experiments were performed with three controllers, which were developed using different methodologies, applied to the case study of an active suspension system, where the loop is closed over the FlexRay protocol.

A importância das redes de comunicação industriais em modernos sistemas de automação e controle industriais tem aumentado significativamente nos últimos anos, devido aos avanços nas áreas de processadores e softwares embarcados, que permitem o desenvolvimento de dispositivos com elevada capacidade de processamento a custos reduzidos. Estas características também são muito importantes em sistemas automotivos, visto que existe uma tendência para a substituição de sistemas mecânicos e hidráulicos em veículos e o espaço disponível para implementação é bastante reduzido. Esta substituição passa pela elaboração de complexos algoritmos de controle, os quais, quando operam sobre uma rede de comunicação, precisam considerar explicitamente os efeitos do canal de comunicação compartilhado na dinâmica do sistema em malha fechada. Este trabalho apresenta uma análise do impacto da comunicação em rede sobre sistemas de controle. Mais especificamente, analisa-se o comportamento do protocolo Flexray, recentemente desenvolvido por um consórcio de importantes empresas e que incorpora interessantes conceitos para escalonamento de mensagens síncronas e assíncronas. No trabalho foram realizados experimentos com três diferentes tipos de controladores aplicados ao estudo de caso de uma suspensão ativa, onde o sistema tem sua malha fechada sobre a rede FlexRay. / The importance of communication networks on modern automation systems has increased significantly over the last years, mostly due to advances in embedded microprocessor and software technologies, which enable the development of devices with high processing power at reduced costs. These characteristics are very important for vehicle systems, since there is nowadays a trend to replace mechanical and hydraulic systems, and the space available for implementation is limited. This replacement requires very complex control algorithms, which, when operating on a communication network, have to consider explicitly the effects introduced by the shared communication channel on the closed loop system dynamics. This work presents an analysis of the network communication impact over control systems. More specifically, it is of interest to analyse the behavior of the FlexRay protocol, which has been recently developed by a Consortium of important companies and incorporates interesting concepts of synchronous and asynchronous message scheduling. In this work, some experiments were performed with three controllers, which were developed using different methodologies, applied to the case study of an active suspension system, where the loop is closed over the FlexRay protocol.

A importância das redes de comunicação industriais em modernos sistemas de automação e controle industriais tem aumentado significativamente nos últimos anos, devido aos avanços nas áreas de processadores e softwares embarcados, que permitem o desenvolvimento de dispositivos com elevada capacidade de processamento a custos reduzidos. Estas características também são muito importantes em sistemas automotivos, visto que existe uma tendência para a substituição de sistemas mecânicos e hidráulicos em veículos e o espaço disponível para implementação é bastante reduzido. Esta substituição passa pela elaboração de complexos algoritmos de controle, os quais, quando operam sobre uma rede de comunicação, precisam considerar explicitamente os efeitos do canal de comunicação compartilhado na dinâmica do sistema em malha fechada. Este trabalho apresenta uma análise do impacto da comunicação em rede sobre sistemas de controle. Mais especificamente, analisa-se o comportamento do protocolo Flexray, recentemente desenvolvido por um consórcio de importantes empresas e que incorpora interessantes conceitos para escalonamento de mensagens síncronas e assíncronas. No trabalho foram realizados experimentos com três diferentes tipos de controladores aplicados ao estudo de caso de uma suspensão ativa, onde o sistema tem sua malha fechada sobre a rede FlexRay. / The importance of communication networks on modern automation systems has increased significantly over the last years, mostly due to advances in embedded microprocessor and software technologies, which enable the development of devices with high processing power at reduced costs. These characteristics are very important for vehicle systems, since there is nowadays a trend to replace mechanical and hydraulic systems, and the space available for implementation is limited. This replacement requires very complex control algorithms, which, when operating on a communication network, have to consider explicitly the effects introduced by the shared communication channel on the closed loop system dynamics. This work presents an analysis of the network communication impact over control systems. More specifically, it is of interest to analyse the behavior of the FlexRay protocol, which has been recently developed by a Consortium of important companies and incorporates interesting concepts of synchronous and asynchronous message scheduling. In this work, some experiments were performed with three controllers, which were developed using different methodologies, applied to the case study of an active suspension system, where the loop is closed over the FlexRay protocol.

A typical automobile system consists of many Electronic Control Units (ECUs) for the purposes of safety, comfort, and entertainment applications. FlexRay is a high bandwidth protocol for such automotive requirements, which facilitates communication between distributed ECUs. This thesis addresses some of the issues associated with the design and implementation of the FlexRay protocol. The number of ECUs that are used in automobiles has an increasing trend to implement more functionality, which demands more bandwidth. By minimizing bandwidth requirements for servicing a given workload of periodic and sporadic real-time tasks, one can connect more ECUs to the same FlexRay bus. With this motivation, the first part of this thesis proposes new algorithms for minimizing bandwidth usage of ECUs in both the static and the dynamic segments of FlexRay. FlexRay provides a time-triggered static segment for the transmission of time critical periodic messages. The static segment consists of a fixed number of static slots each with a fixed duration. The duration of the static slot and the number of slots are design parameters which need to be fixed so as to meet all the deadline requirements of the workload in the application. The static slot duration can be minimized by packing the signals into message frames, while respecting scheduling constraints. Since message frames also contain overhead information, the duration of message frames can be optimized by proper signal packing, based on the network utilization constraints of individual ECUs. The thesis proposes a novel algorithm for packing of signals into message frames and fixing the static slot duration so that the total duration of the static segment is minimized. The dynamic segment of FlexRay caters to the transmission of event-triggered signals. A novel algorithm has been proposed to obtain the minimum duration of the dynamic segment while meeting the deadline constraints of all sporadic messages in their worst-case arrival instances. We also extend all these algorithms to the case of slot multiplexing scheme provided by FlexRay 3.0. Modern automobiles provide infotainment and in-car telemetry functions, which produce a high volume of soft deadline messages. This makes the problem of analyzing scheduling algorithms for such traffic important. The dynamic segment of the FlexRay cycle is used for transmission of such soft deadline messages. The second part of this thesis addresses the issue of analyzing the quality of performance in servicing of the soft deadline tasks in the FlexRay protocol. Two quality measures, namely, the average delay in servicing of the soft deadline tasks and the fraction of tasks that miss their deadlines, are considered. The generation of different soft deadline messages is modeled as independent Poisson processes. The generated messages are queued in different queues and are serviced according to pre-assigned priorities for different queues as per the FlexRay protocol. By analyzing this multiple queue model under some mild assumptions, upper bounds on the arrival rates for different messages are derived so that all the queues are stable. Analytical expressions are also derived for average delay and for deadline miss ratio. The correctness of these approximate analytical expressions are demonstrated through simulation studies.