Project Resources
Project Resources
Here are some project resources that you might find useful:
Background
The term ``black box'' is most commonly used to describe the computerized flight data recorders carried by aircraft. In the event of a mishap, data stored in the black box can provide indespensible help in understanding the dynamics and underlying cause of an accident.
Black box technologies have been part of aviation since its earliest days (i.e., the Wright Brothers). Then starting in the early 1970s, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) recommended that automobile manufactures gather data on crashes using onboard sensing and recorders. Today black box technologies can be found in a wide range of transportation systems (planes, trains, automobiles and ships). State-of-the-art have onboard computers and cameras that allow for real-time incident detection and recording, event classification, and health monitoring of the engine, brakes, and other vital components, with critical data downloads occuring over wireless networks.
From a design standpoint, FAA regulations require that flight recorders for newly manufactured aircraft accurately monitor at least 28 critical factors, such as time, altitude, in-flight air speed, heading, flap position, auto-pilot mode, and aircraft attitude. A second black box, the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), documents radio transmissions and sounds in the cockpit {e.g., engine noise, stall warnings, landing gear extension and retraction) that might serve as indicators of a system failure.
Standard black box components include a power supply, a memory unit, electronic controller board, input devices, and a signal beacon. Each recorder may be equipped with an underwater locator beacon (ULB) to assist in identifying its location in the event of an overwater accident. The key to manufacturing a successful black box is to make it maintenance free and as indestructible as possible. The average time between failures for these devices should be greater than 15,000 hours.
Project Opportunity
The purpose of this project will be to create a system-level design representation for a "black box" system tailored to the functional needs of an Army Transportation Vehicle.
References
Project Opportunity
This project requires you to design an automotive bus. The need for buses stems from the amount and complexity of the network of electronics on a modern vehicle. A bus is used to multiplex signals over the same physical medium. The amount of wiring in today's vehicles can be easily exceed 4 km. By replacing this wiring with a shared bus, a significant weight and cost savings can be achieved. However, these have to be held into check with the downsides of sharing a bus, such as possible contention and starvation issues. A bus also creates a single point of failure for the system and additional precautions should be taken to ensure reliable performance. A typical car contains many such buses.
A bus includes both a hardware and a protocol design. The hardware should allow for connectivity of devices and if there is redundancy, this should be specified. The topology of the bus will likely be determined by the choice of hardware. Star topologies are very common, but not the only possibility. The protocol should allow multiple devices to communicate with one another using the described hardware. The requirements will depend on the application. Some applications, such as multimedia are less sensitive to data loss, but in some applications, messages will need to be carefully prioritized and there will be hard timing constraints. Determining what specific requirements are needed will be part of the project depending on the particular application.
The emphasis of this project will be to accurately assess at the outset whether a set of technological goals are attainable and affordable.
CAN bus is the most common automotive bus and the attached paper gives an overview of how it works. The second paper gives an overview of different buses that are in use on the market today.
References
Background
Project Opportunity
References
Model-Based Systems Engineering and Platform-Based Design
Last Modified: September 27, 2010
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