Moving beyond the component boundaries for efficient test and diagnosis of automotive communication architectures

Integration work at system level has been made easier with the introduction of the time-triggered concept and technologies such as FlexRay. Paradoxically, the ongoing integration efforts at component level have led to complex local interactions between the subsystems that are difficult to analyze globally. We present in this work a test environment for automotive networks that goes beyond the component boundaries and enables the concurrent analysis of the entire communication architecture. This supports the investigation of data- and fault propagation within the system as well as the analysis of the interactions between the components. Supported by an industrial use case, we discuss how this environment improves fault detection and diagnosis of the system.