The design of the CANbids architecture

Despite the significant advantages of the Controller Area Network (CAN) there is an extended belief that CAN is not suitable for critical applications, mainly because of several dependability limitations. During the CANbids project each one of these limitations has been addressed and a complete architecture for CAN-based fault-tolerant systems has been devised. This architecture allows building highly-reliable systems. This paper describes the design of such an architecture and the prototyping of its fundamental parts.