Migration from CAN to TTCAN for a Distributed Control System

Besides the well established event triggered bus protocols (such as, for instance, the CAN bus protocol) recently the demand for time triggered communication systems has intensified. In order to accommodate demand, an extension of the CAN bus protocol to TTCAN (Time Triggered CAN) has been specified in ISO 11898-4. In the meantime also a silicon implementation of TTCAN is available. Since there are no TTCAN compliant sensors and ECUs so far, for an initial examination an intelligent CAN/TTCAN gateway has been developed. In this way a laboratory style migration of a distributed control system which actually was developed around the CAN bus to its time triggered version TTCAN easily succeed. This migration is carried out here exemplarily by means of a vehicle dynamics control concept. Furthermore, the article gives some remarks concerning the synchronization of the sensors and the task management with the bus cycle.