Safety and System Integrity of Isobus Applications for Agricultural Machine Control System (AMCS)

This paper concerns the safety and system integrity analysis of a typical ISOBUS implementation for the communication network of a distributed mechatronics system for agricultural machines. Despite ISOBUS, described by the international standard communication network, is standardized under the norm ISO11783, we will make an analytical overview of a hybrid network for off-highway vehicles where ISOBUS and FlexRay protocols co-exist. A functional analysis has been conducted and a methodology for a quantitative evaluation of the overall system (in terms of performance and reliability) is carried out. The experiments described here (including the timeframe for future works) take the move from the framework depicted by the regional-funded project Pro-Tract: a lab has been set up to investigate these items related to off-highway vehicles.