ABSTRACT
The terrestrial transportation sector provides some interesting extreme environments for the electronic systems that are on board. This chapter describes the main things that electronics have to endure in order to survive and perform. There are a variety of different forms of transportation where electronics now has to play a part, with the key sectors being automotive, aerospace, marine, and traction (where in this context we define traction as large-scale land-based haulage—including trains and trams). The requirements for electronic systems are varied and increasingly demanding, with an ever greater reliance on robust, advanced, and intelligent systems. While there are obviously common themes across all the transportation areas, each sector has its own specific issues and these will be discussed in this chapter. In each sector, the requirements for electronics designers are driven from international standards, which may be Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), British Standards Institute (BSI), and European Standards (EN—also CEN, CENELEC, and ETSI), to name but a few.
