A Framework for Designing Zonal Architectures for In-Vehicle Networks: Balancing Communication Load and Wiring Length

The electrical and electronic (E/E) architectures are a growing concern in the automotive industry, driven by the increasing prevalence of software-oriented features and technologies. As system complexity rises, many automotive companies are exploring new architectural strategies to manage this complexity effectively. In this research, we focused on the zonal E/E architectures as a future solution and proposed a framework for their design. The framework integrates the software and physical components that form the zonal architectures and analyzes the decisions that map the relationships between these elements. Its goal is to create zonal architectures that balance key performance metrics, such as communication load and wiring length. To achieve this, we formulated the zonal architecting problem (ZAP) based on the proposed framework and developed a column generation method to solve it. The framework and its mathematical model were applied to a use case involving advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS), demonstrating that our approach significantly improves both communication load and wiring length, thereby validating the effectiveness of the proposed framework.