Designing Tomorrow’s Vehicles with Automotive PLM Solutions

New requirements and trends require modern automotive PLM solutions

The Changing Landscape of Automotive Product Development

In today’s rapidly changing automotive environment, companies need to be innovative enough to anticipate what consumers want in order to stay competitive before they ask for it. Today, personal vehicles offer more than simply a means of transportation; they also provide connectivity, navigation, entertainment, as well as the assurance of occupant safety and convenience through intelligent safety systems and autonomous functionality. As quickly as new consumer demands evolve, automotive companies need a vehicle development process that can quickly adapt to new business models, rapid advances in vehicular and manufacturing technologies, changes in global regulations, and even changes to the global demand.

Add to this the supply chain issues that have unfolded over the last two years resulting in a “…global semiconductor shortage that [sic] continues to squeeze the supply of microchips used to manufacture everything from cars to robotic vacuum cleaners, and it’s wreaking havoc on the auto industry. Almost every manufacturer has faced production delays and temporary shutdowns as they wait for the chips they need to finish building cars on the assembly line, with some manufacturers temporarily suspending certain optional features in order to keep new cars moving to consumer markets.” According to this recent article in Consumer Reports “it’s looking increasingly likely that vehicle supplies won’t return to something we might consider normal until the end of 2022 at the earliest, and possibly well into 2023.”

Today’s vehicles are no longer mechanical machines, but rather a complex ecosystem of hardware, electronics, and software. Man landed on the moon with less complex systems than are in today’s vehicles. There is no anticipating what tomorrow’s consumers will require.

To increase development agility, OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers need enterprise PLM software that can evolve quickly to fit their increasingly changing needs. Additionally, interdisciplinary, collaborative processes are more important than ever across all aspects of the global design stages. Companies can no longer afford to cascade development from one discipline’s silo to the next. Concurrent engineering has become an absolute necessity.

As the need for maintaining relationships between disciplines, early visibility, and ad hoc collaboration grows, a single, integrated data representation of the emerging design and changing requirements is increasingly necessary. At the same time, data in all its forms, for example, documents, decisions, changes, configuration, specifications, statuses, etc., needs to flow effortlessly from the first requirements to engineering and production, all the way through to maintenance and end of life.

OEMs developing tomorrow’s vehicles are often dependent on traditional technology to support the development process and frequently rely on legacy systems that need to be maintained and operated with great effort and considerable expense. These traditional systems have rigid architectures that cannot be configured rapidly enough to support emerging, unanticipated requirements.

Agile and open platforms that manage hardware, software, and electronics are necessary to empower the design of tomorrow’s vehicles today. Aras’ resilient platform extends throughout all phases of the product lifecycle, across disciplines, product lines, locations, and supply chain. An open, resilient architecture enables companies to implement change incrementally. It can synchronize data from old systems as those systems continue to meet the business needs of the company while addressing new requirements with simple configurations, and incremental deployment.

Challenges for the Automobile Industry

No other industry is continually reinventing itself at the pace that automotive companies are innovating. Not only are the vehicles themselves changing rapidly, but the design processes and software development required to develop these complex machines is constantly changing as well. Aside from the growing demands for interdisciplinary collaboration, vehicles are often developed with a highly complex network of suppliers that must work collaboratively with OEMs. Manufacturers’ IT systems must share data efficiently while guaranteeing the necessary traceability and security of intellectual property.

A unified product development platform that reaches across disciplines to enable concurrent design is a necessity. However, disruption caused by upgrading traditional product development systems can be lengthy, expensive, and highly demanding of internal resources. In CIMdata’s “Deferred PLM Modernization Delays Time to Value,” traditional systems get upgraded every eight to ten years, at an average cost of $1.2M, and take over a year to complete. This is where an incremental approach to IT system design can solve problems before they happen. Rather than ripping out and replacing all of the critical systems at once, new systems must work in tandem with legacy systems until the point that the old system can be replaced with minimal disruption to the business.

Did you know that according to engineering.com, poor requirements management results in:

46%

increase in product costs

38%

increase in product delays

36%

of products being shipped with missing functionality

Systems Engineering and Requirements Management

The common platforms and similar technologies of yesterday’s vehicles meant that the development followed anticipated patterns from target setting, to design and testing, through to launch. However, rapidly evolving propulsion technologies and disruptive electronic innovations mean that the way an automotive program is planned and scheduled needs to reflect these unanticipated new requirements.

Vehicle programs have always been highly driven by requirements, but what is changing is how many of those requirements are completely different from one program to the next. Forty years ago, vehicle development processes naturally anticipated that all vehicles contain internal combustion engines, an assumption that has not been valid for the last ten years or so. Requirements need to be developed for new, innovative technology and dropped for the old. Requirements management systems themselves need increasing levels of flexibility, traceability, and the ability to evolve as quickly as the technology itself.

As each unique vehicle development program has a number of singular needs, requirements from other programs can be incorporated to reduce development time and time to market. Safety and performance requirements can often carry over between vehicle programs; consequently, program designers must choose which to keep and which to replace. This type of data reuse does not concern parts (although that may be the final result), but the requirements themselves can benefit from variant management principles. Approaching the product development process from a product line engineering (PLE) perspective can help OEMs maximize reuse and accelerate design time and speed to market with the latest, most innovative products.

Designing Tomorrow’s Vehicles with Automotive PLM Solutions

Multidisciplinary Collaboration

Ideas of agile development are taking hold in the automotive industry in ways that traditional product development models have not. Marketing, planning, and business development departments need to be closely aligned to the engineering, manufacturing, supply chain, and aftermarket departments in order to best anticipate customers’ eventual needs.

The fastest changing aspect of the automotive landscape is undeniably vehicle digitalization. Development of autonomous vehicles, connected cars, and electromechanical drivetrains requires various disciplines to collaborate more closely than ever before and in real time. A bill of materials is no longer a list of parts but also contains crucial software assemblies and subassemblies that have complex interdependencies with hardware and electronics that needs to be tracked and managed cohesively.

The interface and dependencies of automotive electrical and mechanical systems introduces increasing complexity in co-development between development teams, creating an environment where data managed in separate silos will no longer work. “Over the wall” engineering is dead. The challenge of maintaining and accessing the concept, development, and manufacturing data often leads to inefficiency and incorrect data. These inefficiencies manifest in tasks such as querying different systems to get in-context, correct data, correlating this data from one global system to another global system, etc.

The need for open collaboration extends beyond the confines of the OEM. Today’s vehicles are co-developed in an increasingly complex network of global suppliers that must work in harmony with OEMs. Manufacturers’ IT systems must be able to not only share data efficiently, but also guarantee the necessary traceability. It is more important than ever for manufacturers to have reliable data on all installed components and their properties across their various product lines, including variants.

Realistically, the IT landscape of the automotive industry remains outdated in many areas. Legacy systems must be maintained and operated, often with significant effort and considerable expense; however, these systems are still integral to the continued development of vehicle programs as well as legacy data reuse. Ideally, data management systems that can extend and complement these systems through data federation until the system itself can be rebuilt on a modern architecture, will ensure that development can continue uninterrupted. Furthermore, if these product data management systems possess a capability that enables continuous integration where development of new vehicle features and applications can always be integrated into existing applications with low to no interruption, it will increase productivity and benefit end users.

Digital Twin and Digital Thread in Automotive

As the product history is captured throughout the vehicle development process, this becomes the digital thread. Decisions made on one vehicle program can be leveraged on another encouraging product line data reuse and reducing time to market. For a digital thread to be robust, it must record dependencies captured throughout the entire lifecycle—not starting and stopping at the design phase, as often happens. Version histories, engineering change order specifics, and testing data must easily line up with cataloged and maintained simulation data. In today’s environment, it is essential that vehicle requirements, systems and software development, version histories, and hardware dependencies weave through the thread as well, in ways that are not traditional in many systems.

As the vehicle progresses throughout its lifecycle, a data driven—digital thread history is formed that once manufactured, can be accessed through its individual digital twin configuration. The model-based enterprise thrives in this environment as the 3D geometry and product manufacturing information (PMI) become the master representation of the design accompanied by the related metadata. However, stopping with the twin at this point is a common mistake. Initially the product data represents the “as designed” model along with the software versions related to it. As the product is built manufacturing data such as part serial numbers, lot effectivity, or deviation reports are linked using the digital thread, resulting in an “as built” digital twin configuration. As the vehicle moves into the field, more changes are made over time, and the only way to have an accurate data representation is to keep an “as running” digital twin configuration.

At the same time, the demand for customization continues to grow—resulting in an increased need for tracking the myriad variants and options applicable to any given vehicle. The vehicles of tomorrow are built with platform thinking, but modular design will rule the final result. That is not to say that there is a finite number of variations for any given vehicle. Running changes to a vehicle product line are common, as well as those needed to rectify quality issues or change vendors. These changes are effective on a subset of the produced VINs and must be tracked.

These variations can apply throughout the entire product lifecycle—from production to maintenance—and need to be tracked accordingly. As the vehicle is produced and launched into the field, that vehicle is unique, the data that defines that unit evolves and must be managed separately from the conceptual model. Once the vehicle is in service, parts or software versions continue to change as the vehicle is maintained. Ideally safety bulletins are only issued against affected vehicles, however it is impossible to identify these vehicles without tracking the “as maintained” configuration of each individual unit.

Model Based Engineering — The Link from Requirements to Simulation and Beyond

There is a common misconception that model based engineering (MBE) in automotive begins with geometry. To reap the benefits of a true MBE, the knowledge must begin with pervasive links to the requirements that affected the design, intent, history, through to the related simulations and test and validation phases. The “model” in MBE is based on requirements that must be linked and maintained throughout development.

In addition to strong PLM practices, robust simulation process and data management is crucial to maintaining an unbroken digital thread. Systematic and traceable simulation across the vehicle lifecycle enables the development of simulation best practices, reuse, and democratization moving in the direction of AI based algorithms. Of course, the benefit of computer aided simulation is only as strong as the digital thread to which it is attached, as well as the individual digital twin configuration to which it relates. As simulations run software-in-the-loop analysis, it becomes imperative that a single data management solution for a vehicle is in place to tie assumptions to versions and parameters to results and conclusions. This data can then be linked to verification and test results and even to maintenance.

Traceability spans across numerous automotive disciplines, organizations, and risks losing context as time passes. As systems of systems enter the equation, manual data tracking becomes simply impossible.

Designing Tomorrow’s Vehicles with Automotive PLM Solutions

Enterprise-wide adoption of such comprehensive product development platforms is a key enabler for enterprise-wide implementation of MBE strategy:

Platforms must have:

  • Transparent & interrogatable APIs
  • Full API capabilities exposed
  • Open Data Model
  • Dynamic Data Model
  • Open Data Access

Platforms cannot be limited by:

  • Proprietary APIs
  • Proprietary data models
  • Static/Hard Coded data model
  • Obfuscated data

Changing Business Models

Digital traceability and connectivity are increasingly important in today’s automobiles; many modern vehicles already offer value-added services based on data streams and connectivity. With today’s new business models, such as subscription or car sharing, automobiles are moving toward a model of “mobility as a service (MaaS).” This increases the need for data streams and can also be used for improving autonomous functions, safety, and predictive maintenance.

In the personal transportation market, OEMs generate significant revenue selling replacement parts in addition to the initial vehicle sale. While maintenance is the bread and butter of the dealership network, it enables the OEM to partner with the owner and keep that aftermarket revenue inside of the authorized service center chain. Engineers can use this valuable data in several ways. In addition to predictive maintenance as a service, OEMs can enable over the air (OTA) fixes to software without requiring the customer to visit the shop—limiting downtime. The data generated is crucial to the development of new revenue streams for the OEMs. Data services such as in car entertainment, theft deterrents, roadside assistance, and safety monitoring are an increasing opportunity for building new recurring revenue through value added subscription models.

The Role of an Automotive Vehicle Development Platform

Vehicle development systems are not to be confused with the applications necessary to support them. Most PLM tools are limited to engineering collaboration processes around the “science” data of the vehicle; they are limited in the ecosystem to support all types of data in the overall development process. Even then, the focus is on the traditional vehicles that are mostly in the mechanical space. An ideal vehicle development platform has certain aspects that are necessary to run a continuous, traceable, nimble process.

The platform must be:

  • Adaptable to changing customer demands surrounding vehicle electrification, safety, and autonomous technology and business processes
  • Customizable to work the way your global development and manufacturing process work rather than the way a generic system is hardcoded or configured to function
  • Open and transparent to enable multi-year, cross functional collaboration and end-to-end visibility with traceability and integration with legacy systems
  • Evolutionary in design, built to adapt and change in an agile manner, and open to easily meet future needs that are not yet apparent

In order to address constantly changing customer, dealer, regulatory, and economic requirements, a vehicle development platform must be ready to evolve quickly. The Aras automotive PLM solution is built for customization. The industrial low-code platform provides an open, transparent, and multifunctional collaboration hub that is needed for today’s agile vehicle development and manufacturing processes. The capability for low-code development assures automotive companies that their tools and systems will evolve with business needs rather than being stuck at a single point in time.

Read more about the Aras Resilient Platform.

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