Abstract: The increasing importance of FlexRay systems in
automotive domain inspires unceasingly relative researches. One
primary issue among researches is to verify the reliability of FlexRay
systems either from protocol aspect or from system design aspect.
However, research rarely discusses the effect of network topology on
the system reliability. In this paper, we will illustrate how to model
the reliability of FlexRay systems with various network topologies by
a well-known probabilistic reasoning technology, Bayesian Network.
In this illustration, we especially investigate the effectiveness of error
containment built in star topology and fault-tolerant midpoint
synchronization algorithm adopted in FlexRay communication
protocol. Through a FlexRay steer-by-wire case study, the influence
of different topologies on the failure probability of the FlexRay steerby-
wire system is demonstrated. The notable value of this research is
to show that the Bayesian Network inference is a powerful and
feasible method for the reliability assessment of FlexRay systems.