Automotive

Abstract

The automotive industry is one of the most advanced industries using information technologies for product development. The product variety and complexity have grown dramatically over the last decades. These enhancements could only be achieved by using the full range of technologies and methods described in part two. Within automotive engineering companies are continuously looking for new ways to achieve economic growth. Trends show that this is often done by expansion of existing markets as well as entering new markets, providing niche products and increasing productivity. This effects significantly the continuous development of processes and IT solutions. Legacy Systems have to be integrated with modern solutions. Service oriented architectures (SOA) and semantic nets will lead to a new system landscape. This change is not only a technical one but also an organizational paradigm shift which has to be handled carefully. To establish an international, multi-company concurrent engineering process, a common understanding of processes and business objects is required. The most efficient way to do this is standardization. The "Code of PLM Openness" (CPO) helps to find a common definition which lead to a better understanding of system integration and usage of standards. Two Standards play a significant role: ISO 10303 (STEP) with its new application protocol 242 which combines the known protocols for automotive and aerospace including model based system engineering and ISO 14306 (JT) for DMU and geometrical collaboration. The continuous enhancements of CAD systems lead to a knowledge-based engineering (KBE) approach by handling parametrics and associativity.