Options handling using external devices in forklift trucks

Sammanfattning: Unique customizations (options) of features in forklifts are often requested by customers. When new options are created or existing options have to be modified in the main software the complexity increases, the firmware revision pool gets large and with the increasing code size the memory limit is threatened. This affects the software development since the frequent modification of the option handler software is very resource consuming. Therefore it is desirable to have a highly modular system for the option handler to simplify the development process. Although the market value of this improvement is negligible the possible long term savings is the desirable effect. This thesis explores the possibility of migrating the option handling software to a dedicated hardware module. This helps the development process by increasing the modularity of the system architecture and thus reducing the development scope. The tools and the approach to accomplish this option handler is analyzed. A system model of the resulting approach is designed and a prototype is developed to validate the result.