Message scheduling for the static segment of the FlexRay protocol

In the recent years, bus-based communication protocols have been developed to support time-critical applications in in-vehicle communication. In this respect, the FlexRay protocol is likely to become the de-facto standard. In this paper, we investigate the scheduling problem of periodic messages in the static segment of the FlexRay protocol. We determine a message schedule such that the available bandwidth is used in the most efficient manner. For this purpose we propose an appropriate system architecture, formulate the performance metrics and derive an integer linear programming (ILP) problem. An exemplary study illustrates our approach.