On the Integration of Electrical/Electronic Product Data in the Automotive Domain

The recent innovation of modern cars has mainly been driven by the development of new as well as the continuous improvement of existing electrical and electronic (E/E) components, including sensors, actuators, and electronic control units. This trend has been accompanied by an increasing complexity of E/E components and their numerous interdependencies. In addition, external impact factors (e.g., changes of regulations, product innovations) demand for more sophisticated E/E product data management (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is usually scattered over a large number of distributed, heterogeneous IT systems,
application-spanning use cases are difficult to realize (e.g., ensuring the consistency of artifacts corresponding to different development phases, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units). To tackle this challenge, the partial integration of E/E product data as well as corresponding schemas becomes necessary. This paper presents the properties of a typical IT system landscape related to E/E-PDM, reveals challenges emerging in this context, and elicits requirements for E/E-PDM. Based on this, insights into our framework, which targets at the partial integration of E/E product data, are given. Such an integration will foster E/E product data integration and hence contribute to an improved E/E product quality.