Simulation of safety critical applications for automotive using multicore scheduling

Technology development has paved the way for enhancement of safety features in a car which has become an important buying factor for customers. Such enhancement demands more computing power. The Electronic Control Units with multicore architecture can be a solution. This offers parallelism which improves the response time of the system. In this paper, Electronic Stability Control and Antilock Braking Systems are the two safety critical applications considered for improving the response time through multicore implementation. Data dependencies may occur between the tasks of different cores. One way to overcome the dependencies is through the shared memory which requires inter-process communication protocols such as mail box and queues. In this paper, the mailbox is used for storing the common parameter between the two applications which is the value of brake torque for each wheel. The task set is developed for these applications and scheduled using clock-driven scheduling algorithm. The TORCHE toolbox in Matlab is used for simulating the task set in single core and multicore architectures of ECU. The simulation results indicate the significant improvement in temporal characteristics of task execution in multicore when compared with the single core implementation.