Vehicle Level Approach for Optimization of On-Board Diagnostic Strategies for Fault Management 2013-01-0957

As the vehicle functions are getting distributed over multiple ECUs in order to realize various complex control functions, the need for sophisticated on-board diagnostic strategies are increasing in automotive domain, leading to a significant amount of hardware and software implementations for fault management inside various ECUs in the vehicle.

This paper proposes optimized vehicle level approach for fault management strategies, wherein a centralized intelligent Gateway Module is proposed in the vehicle network architecture, which will be responsible for fault management of the complete vehicle in a chronological sequence. This Gateway Module will thereby have the possibility to group a cluster of faults raised by different ECUs and correlate them meaningfully to guide the operator towards root cause of the fault. This paper also proposes how such an intelligent gateway module will capture, classify and correlate the fault information from the distributed network architecture, leading to efficient filtering of primary faults of the vehicle. The primary fault records of the vehicle will then be managed within the error memory of the Gateway Module throughout the complete life cycle in a chronological sequence.

The proposed on board diagnostic strategies in this paper are not only aimed to provide off-board guidance to technicians, enabling enhanced guided diagnostics in the field service, but also to provide on-board safety oriented perspectives during vehicle's operation. This will allow the ECUs to go to selective degradation mode, without completely shutting down their critical control functionalities, which might lead to safety issues and customer dissatisfaction during vehicle's operation.