Patent ID: 7596636

Claim:
A method of integrating a plurality of peripherals into a reconfigurable control and interconnection system of a vehicle comprising: defining a set of available preferences that identify qualified peripherals provided by third party or post-manufacture add on peripheral providers that are approved for integration into vehicle control and integration systems; establishing a compatible set of options to customize a customer vehicle based upon the set of available preferences; receiving from said customer, an order for a customized control and interconnection system for installation into the customer's vehicle based upon the compatible set of options selected by the customer; installing a customized control and interconnection system into the customer's vehicle in response to the customer order, said control and interconnection system comprising: a system core that implements data processing of the control and interconnection system, an input module that couples signals from associated external peripherals to said system core and an output module that directs signals from said system core to corresponding external peripherals, wherein said system core comprises: a reconfigurable space within the system core, at least portions of which are allocated to associated peripherals to offload at least some peripheral processing requirements to the system core, the reconfigurable space having reconfigurable hardware for supporting hardware programming and memory for supporting reconfigurable software programming; and a supervising processor customized to said order, said supervising processor configured to: during operation of said vehicle, provide control information to identified peripherals as necessary to implement a customized overall configuration; and control the allocation and configuration of said reconfigurable space into a plurality of independent information processing workspaces, where each information processing workspace supports hardware, software or both hardware and software such that peripheral defined functionalities are relocated from an associated peripheral to said system core; programming said system core based upon the compatible set of options ordered by the customer; installing at least one external peripheral associated with said compatible set of options ordered by the customer into the customer's vehicle; and interfacing installed external peripherals with said control and interconnection system.