Development of a Power and Communication Bus Using HIL and Computational Intelligence

Abstract

This paper deals with the development of a power and communication bus named DLN (Device Lightweight Network) that can be seen as a new interface with auto-addressing functionality to transfer power and data by means of two wires in modern cars. The main research goal of this paper is to elaborate a new method based on a hardware in the loop technique aided by computational intelligence algorithms in order to search for the optimal structure of the communication modules, as well as optimal features of hardware parts and the values of software parameters. The desired properties of communication modules, which have a strong influence on the performance of the bus, cannot be found using a classical engineering approach due to the large number of possible combinations of configuration of the hardware and software parts of the whole system. Therefore, an HIL-based optimization method for bus prototyping is proposed, in which the optimization task is formulated as a multi-criteria optimization problem. Several criterion functions are proposed, corresponding to the automotive objectives and requirements. Different soft computing optimization algorithms, such as a single-objective/multi-objectives evolutionary algorithm and a particle swarm optimization algorithm, are applied to searching for the optimal solution. The verification study was carried out in order to show the merits and limitations of the proposed approach. Attention was also paid to the problem of the selection of the behavioural parameters of the heuristic algorithms. The overall results proved the high practical potential of the DLN, which was developed using the proposed optimization method.