Event-based diagnostics in heavy-duty vehicles

Abstract: The integration of small computer units in vehicles has made new and more complex functionalitypossible within the vehicle industry. To verify that the functionality is working and to troubleshoot it when a fault is detected requires a set of diagnostic services. Due to the increasing complexity of the functionality the diagnostic services need to extract more data to be able to diagnose the functionality. This causes an increased network load which soon threatens to become too high for some of the current networks. New ways to diagnose functionality in vehicles are therefore needed. The aim of this thesis was to investigate the need for an event-based service within the domain of vehicle diagnostics as well as presenting a recommendation of how sucha service should be designed. The thesis also aimed at eliciting obstacles and pitfalls connected with the implementation of the service in the current software architecture in heavy duty vehicles. An industrial case study was performed at the Swedish company Scania to elicit the potential need, problems and limitations with an event-based service for vehicle diagnostics. First a set of experts representing different domains within vehicle diagnostics were interviewed to investigate the need and potential of the service for different use cases. Requirements were elicited and compared with the service ResponseOnEvent defined inthe ISO standard 14229-1:2013. A decision was then made to diverge from the standard inorder to increase the number of fulfilled requirements and flexibility of the service. A new proprietary service was therefore created and evaluated through a proof of concept wherea prototype of the service was implemented in one client and one server control unit. A final recommendation was then given suggesting how to implement an event-based service and how to solve the found problems. The elicitation of the need for an event-based service resulted a confirmed need in three different domains and 23 different requirements which the service ResponseOnEvent was compared against. The service failed to meet all the requirements and therefore a proprietary service was designed. The prototype implementation of the proprietary service showed on multiple difficulties connected to the realization of an event-based service in the current architecture. One of the biggest was the fact that diagnostic services was assumed to always have a one-to-one relation between request and response, which an event-based service would not have. Different workarounds were discovered and assessed. Another problem was the linking between an event triggered response message and the triggercondition. It was concluded that some restrictions would have to be made to facilitatethe process of linking a response to its trigger condition. Non-determinism was another problem, since there were no guarantees that an event would not trigger too often causinga bus overload. In the final recommendation there are suggestions of how to solve these problems and some suggested areas for further research. The thesis confirms the need for a new way to diagnose vehicle functionality due to their increased complexity and the limited bandwidth of some of today’s in-vehicle networks. The event-based service ResponseOnEvent offers a good alternative but might lacksome key functionality. Therefore it might be valuable to consider a proprietary service instead. Due to its nature, an event-based service might require a restructuring of thesystem architecture and limitations in the hardware might limit the usability and flexibilityof the service. Keywords: event-based service, Response on Event, ECU, Vehicle Diagnostics, UDS,KWP.