A collision-avoidance system for an electric vehicle: a drive-by-wire technology initiative

The proposed collision-avoidance system has a network of near real-time embedded subsystems, designed to exploit three operational conditions to control the warning and speed of an electric vehicle at an imminent collision. Further recommended is a multi-level redundancy strategy, using a majority-voting pattern and a fault-tolerant bus, to ensure the efficient operation of the collision-avoidance system in case of a fault in any of its networked subsystems. Analytically studied is the performance evaluation of the fault-tolerant system and its effect on the data processing time. Implementation results demonstrate the proposed fault-tolerant strategy, which takes into account the reliability of both subsystems and data, to be more efficient than a hardware or software sole-based fault-tolerant system.