Towards a Systems Engineering Methodology for Architecture Development of Vehicle Concepts

Abstract

The automotive industry is undergoing a huge change, as the global trends digitalization, sustainability and urbanization are further accelerating. Cars are evolving from mechanical dominated systems to complex interdisciplinary systems. New market demands and complex functionalities include all engineering disciplines throughout multiple subsystems of the vehicle. Current industry practice shows that these challenges of complex and interdisciplinary development cannot be met yet. Existing processes and mindsets are often narrowed on single engineering disciplines or systems. Especially during concept phase, which has a big leverage on the further development, the current focus is mechanical, geometrical design. The theory of product development and Systems Engineering address these challenges and provide suitable approaches with structured product models. This contribution elaborates state of the art and adapts it to a new methodology to introduced Systems Engineering to vehicle concept development. The requirements for such methodology are derived, addressing the architecture development of vehicles in terms of Systems Engineering to handle interdisciplinary complexity, enable better consistency and traceability. Based on state of the art research, a product model with four views (requirements, functional, logical and physical; RFLP) is presented. It introduces the Vehicle Systems Architecture, which represents the new understanding of architecture development during vehicle concept phase and contains the important architecture perspectives. The interpretation and role of each view regarding automotive development is elaborated, including its application in the left branch of the V-model with a hierarchical decomposition in system levels. The presented idea of the methodology for vehicle architecture is to enable a consistent, customer- and system-oriented development of complex vehicles by implementing new architecture views.