A Bayesian Network Reliability Modeling for FlexRay Systems

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.

Authors:

• Kuen-Long Leu
• Yung-Yuan Chen
• Chin-Long Wey
• Jwu-E Chen
• Chung-Hsien Hsu

Keywords:

• Bayesian Network
• FlexRay
• fault tolerance
• network topology
• reliability.

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