Identity Manager Solution for Multiple ECUs Physical multiple ECU Advantages > More efficient handling of variants > Less administrative effort > Reduced warehouse costs When tracking the development of ECUs in automobiles, one trend is clearly evident – ECUs are becoming increasingly more power-ful. At the same time, the number of variants is growing drastical-ly, which is reflected in the growing effort required to manage them and also results in growing costs. 3/16 A typical case of physical multiple ECUs are the ECUs for the driver and passenger side doors. These ECUs have nearly identical func-tions. Cost savings are realized by reducing administrative effort. This can only be achieved with the assistance of intelligent solutions that can manage the many different variants. However, there are differences in the receive and send mes-sages, diagnostics and Network Management address. The steps: Develop an ECU that will later be used for both door sides. Load the database that covers the ECUs in the GENy config-uration Based on our many years of working together with automotive OEMs and suppliers, Vector knows these continually recurring use cases well and has developed optimized solutions especially for them. tool and select both ECUs simultaneously. Configure the Identity Manager as a physical multiple ECU and assign a separate identity to each of the nodes (Left ECU, Right ECU). Use cases Practice shows that it is primarily the following three use cases that recur frequently: There are essentially two different ways to proceed in coding: If the message layout is identical between the identities, utilize the manual buffer overlay in GENy. This means that the same signal APIs can be used regardless of the currently active identity. So, only one application needs to be developed, but the ECU acts dif-ferently > Physical multiple ECU > Virtual multiple ECU > Multiple configurations ECU to the outside world depending on the identity which is initialized. The differences are automatically read out from the DBC file. The solution approaches presented below lead to substantial sim-plification, reduce administrative effort and thereby reduce costs. In the second case, buffer overlaying is not needed. Instead, dif-ferentiate between the left and right sides using generated mac-ros Identity An identity identifies an ECU. It determines which variant of the ECU should be activated (e.g. which door side). So, an identity is the configuration of an ECU that is active at run time, based on a description file. An ECU’s identity is set when the ECU is initialized. in the code. It is also easy to implement crossovers of receive and send messages between the two door ECUs while optimizing resources. This software is loaded in the left and right ECUs. The decision on whether the software is to be installed in the left or right door ECU is made with each new initialization. A simple function call establishes the ECU’s identity.