Early-stage Bottleneck Identification and Removal in TSN Networks

There has been a pivotal change in the design of E/E architectures, which is that OEM cannot assume anymore that the functions, and thus the communication requirements, are known in advance and fixed over time. It has become crucial for OEMs to be in the position to add further functions and services during the lifetime of the vehicle: OEMs need to design E/E architectures that are future-proof.
We propose design space exploration algorithms, which, by answering a series of design questions and proposing solutions to the designers, help to improve an automotive E/E architecture in several dimensions: performance, costs, reliability and extensibility. We start by estimating the total "capacity" of a baseline architecture, then, by removing bottlenecks, we obtain an "enhanced capacity" architecture, which is then optimized in terms of costs and reliability. The architecture is then further optimized in terms of costs and reliability. The work is conducted on Volvo's prototype centralized and domain-based E/E architecture.