Exploring trade-off's between centralized versus decentralized automotive architectures using a virtual integration environment

The large variety of architectural dimensions in automotive electronics design, for example, bus protocols, number of nodes, sensors and actuators interconnections and power distribution topologies, makes architecture design task a very complex but crucial design step especially for OEMs. This situation motivates the need for a design environment that accommodates the integration of a variety of models in a manner that enables the exploration of design alternatives in an efficient and seamless fashion. Exploring these design alternatives in a virtual environment and evaluating them with respect to metrics such as cost, latency, flexibility and reliability provide an important competitive advantage to OEMs and help minimize integration risks later in the design cycle. In particular, the choice of the degree of decentralization of the architecture has become a crucial issue in automotive electronics. In this paper, we demonstrate how a rigorous methodology (Platform-Based Design) and the Metropolis framework can be used to find the balance between centralized and decentralized architectures.