In-vehicle monitoring and management for military vehicles’ integrated vetronics architectures

Both the rapid uptake of electronics utilisation for military vehicles (vetronics) and the trend in designing vehicles based on open standards and architectures (such as the UK MoD Generic Vehicle Architecture – Def Stan 23-09 GVA) have resulted in modern and future vehicles becoming highly complex platforms. Although most modern vehicles provide advanced diagnostics and health monitoring, most of these systems focus on end systems and applications and there has been little work on monitoring the infrastructure on which these systems operate. Monitoring the operational integrity of the vetronics that enable integration of vehicle subsystems and providing feedback to the crew offers safety and reliability benefits as it allows the crew to assess in real-time, the vehicle’s ability to complete its mission. This paper presents a novel approach to achieve in-vehicle Vetronics Integrity Monitoring and Management (VIMM). The paper highlights the requirements for a generic modular system, and presents both an architecture and proof-of-concept implementation.