Abstract
This paper proposes the effective monitoring method for marine engine system, which is implemented based upon Controller Area Network (CAN). As the marine engine monitoring system requires various kind of information, a lot of sensor nodes are distributed to several places. The CAN supports huge numbers of message IDs for the sensor nodes and provides a stable communication channel in a wide area such as a 12,000 TEU container ship. Since the CAN is priority-based communication system, some of hard real-time messages like alarm messages which are time-critical to the operation of the vessel cannot be communicated within the dead-time. Therefore it is desirable to distinguish the bandwidth of the CAN for static state messages and transition-state messages not to be harmful to the engine operations. Using the features of message arbitration ability of the CAN, it is proposed in this paper that the bandwidth allocation is dynamically adjusted to cope with the increment of input signal to improve the performance of monitoring system. Effectiveness and validity of the proposed scheme have been demonstrated through real experiments.