Managing Complex Data for Electrical/Electronic Components: Challenges and Requirements

In the automotive domain, innovation is driven by the introduction and continuous improvement of electrical and electronic (E/E) components (e.g. sensors, actuators, and electronic control units). This trend is accompanied by increasing complexity and interdependencies between them. In addition, external impact factors (e.g. changes of regulations) demand for management of E/E product data (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is scattered over distributed heterogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases (e.g. consistency of artifacts, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units) are difficult to realize. Consequently, the partial integration of the corresponding application data models becomes necessary. Changes of application data models are common in context of E/E-PDM, but they are not considered by existing application integration approaches. Furthermore, no methodology for creating application integration models exists. This paper elaborates challenges to be tackled when integrating applications containing E/E product data. It further presents properties of the IT landscape involved in E/E-PDM and reveals occurring problems. Finally, requirements for E/E-PDM are discussed.