Centralized vehicle diagnostics

Current trends in passenger car industry are focused on ceaseless reduction of production costs and thus on more competitive production on an automotive market. This paper describes a new diagnostics method promising direct costs reduction of in-vehicle diagnostics subsystems. The method provides for an easy transition from current decentralized concept of diagnostic probes for particular elements of electric and electronic equipment to a centralized concept based on (in an ideal case) a single measuring probe. Case study on the vehicle ignition system is presented, demonstrating the method principle, advantages and limits. Diagnostic method is based on localization and identification of fault signatures in vehicle power supply network using a template matching algorithm.