Development of integrated diagnostic gateway and conversion algorithm between CAN and K-Line buses

Abstract

Today, each commercial vehicle model of various car manufacturers has heterogeneous diagnostic protocols to support many types of electronic control units over K-Line and CAN buses. The diversity of diagnostic technologies has increased continuously owing to the requirements of new specific definition for each vehicle model. As a consequence, due to increasing the complexity of diagnostics while decreasing the reusability of the existing diagnosis-related codes, development time and costs have increased. To reduce the aforementioned complexity and improve the reusability of diagnostic software, we focus on two kinds of heterogeneous onboard diagnostic protocols that are already widely applied to commercial vehicles in Asia: the K-line bus based ISO 14230 and CAN bus based ISO 15765 protocols. We propose a flexible software architecture for integrating multiple diagnostic protocols between ISO 15765 and ISO 14230, Ethernet protocol as well. We also give some design algorithms for lightweight conversion in an embedded environment. Finally, we verify the proposed software through our test-bed which consists of an electronic control unit and an external diagnostic device that is used by a real commercial vehicle.