Performance Analysis of Distributed Control Systems Using the FlexRay Protocol

Spatially distributed systems which share communication resources have advantages such as lower implementation cost, better flexibility and reliability. When real-time distributed control applications make use of such architecture, the drawbacks are the networked-induced effects, which may severely degrade the controlled system performance. Efforts have been made by both communication and control communities to assess this problem: new control design techniques now consider explicitly the effects of these constraints, and some new communication protocols offer services to support the requirements from this kind of application. FlexRay is a protocol developed to support real-time safety-critical applications. In this study, a FlexRay network is built and an active suspension control is implemented in a distributed environment. The main goal is to analyse the impact the network-induced effects may bring to system performance.