System Level Reliability Issues and Their Enhancement in Drive-by-Wire (DBW) Systems

Drive-by-wire systems in automobiles and fly-by-wire systems in aircrafts have made these vehicles versatile with added features and benefits, along with ease of reconfiguration, in particular during graceful degradation. However, there are certain consequences of such by-wire systems in terms of overall system reliability. The issue has not been quantitatively discussed in the literature in a systematic manner, to the best of the knowledge of the author. The chapter discusses details of the drive-by-wire system architectures from a system viewpoint, analyzes the reliability with quantitative metric, and indicates methods of enhancing reliability by using both hardware and software redundancies.

Keywords: Drive By Wire, Fly By Wire, Multiplexed Systems, System Load Availability, Multi-Protocol Communication, Controller Area Network (CAN).