Abstract
Motor vehicles in general, and compact ones in particular, have experienced a dramatic growth in their contents of E/E-controlled functions, owing to such factors as state regulations, market demands and platform strategy at the OEMs.
New ways of approaching the EEDS design need to be adopted in order to avoid this increase in functions to be translated into bulkier and heavier wiring assemblies, which cannot find their place especially in compact vehicles (C class and such alike). A systems approach instead of a component-oriented one has to be adopted in order to maximise synergies between different EEDS components.
In order to meet these challenges, UTAutomotive has developed a new approach to the EEDS architecture by relying on its power and signal integration technology (Smart Junction and Distribution Nodes, from now on called SDNs). This new approach involves a de-centralisation of the power distribution, by placing several SDNs throughout the vehicle, which are able to communicate between them via a data bus.
This helps reduce not only the amount of wires in the harnesses but also their length, thereby improving total EEDS weight. Vehicle assembly is also eased up, since this approach allows the designer to minimise the amount of wires crossing between different areas of the vehicle (e.g. engine and passenger compartment).
A detailed design of such architecture, its practical implementation in a class C vehicle and a comparison of the main EEDS measurables will be described in this paper.