Method for measuring a temperature change (TINC) in a cable (K) of a vehicle, wherein the cable (K) connects at least two control units (A and B) of the vehicle, the cable (K) is configured at least to transmit signals between the control units (A, B), and each
control unit (A, B) includes a
crystal for time measurement, wherein this time measurement is configured to determine a hardware time of the
control unit (A, B), where It is taken into account that a temperature change (TINC) of the cable (K) slows down the transmission of the signals carried through the cable (K), and To measure the temperature change (TINC), a measurement of the
transit time change of at least one
signal between the control units (A and B) is carried out, whereby a. To synchronize the hardware times of two control units (A and B), an
Ethernet-based
time synchronization protocol is used, in which one
control unit (A, B) is a master and the other control unit (B, A) is a slave, the hardware time of the slave (B, A) is synchronized with the hardware time of the master (A, B), and to distinguish whether measured values obtained from the measurement originate from the
crystal of at least one control unit (A, B) or have resulted from the temperature change (TINC) of the cable (K), control unit (A) and control unit (B) each assume the role of master (A, B) once during one execution of the steps specified by the
time synchronization protocol, thus the measurement is carried out in two configurations, while the other control unit (B, A) assumes the role of slave.and a
delay in the arrival of the messages in both constellations is used to infer the temperature increase (TINC) of the cable (K) and / or , b. To detect an average temperature change (TINC), a number N of sets, each with at least one measured value, are compared, wherein at least a part of the time window during which the measured values were obtained is divided into N intervals, and each measured value of an i set from the N sets was obtained at a time point which lies in the i interval of the considered part of the time window, a point representative of the measured values of each of the N sets is determined, these points are arranged such that the
representative point of set i is positioned on a time axis before the
representative point of set i+1, and an average
temporal change of temperature (TINC) is determined from this and / or c. a temperature-changing control unit (A, B) can be inferred from the knowledge of a cable routing in the vehicle and from the knowledge of the temperature change (TINC) in at least one cable (K) whose cable routing is known.