Network-Centric Approach Using Task Migration for Drive-by-Wire Vehicle Resilience

Abstract

The electronic control unit (ECU), considered the brain of a vehicle, suffers from a design problem called single point of failure (SPOF), which can induce system malfunctions. This problem can be addressed via redundancy, which increases the reliability of a mission-critical system by allowing multiple ECUs to perform a single function. However, this solution requires additional ECU and maintenance costs incurred by the redundant ECUs. A cost-effective approach for improving safety is to utilize the network connectivity between existing ECUs. In this paper, we propose a method that migrates critical tasks residing in an infeasible ECU to a replaceable ECU by using the network connection between them. Furthermore, to demonstrate the feasibility of the method, we implemented a task migration method on a Lego vehicle composed of three ECUs to prevent sudden unintended acceleration accidents caused by faults in an ECU managing the acceleration task.