Abstract
Keywords - EE process chain, Engineering IT integration, Electrics, Electronics, Globalization
Today, Electrics and Electronics (EE) is a key success factor for Automotive Engineering and Innovation. Rising complexity and warranty costs for EE issues shows that a proper management of EE engineering in the early development phase is mandatory. Consequently, Information Technology (IT) for Engineering must sustainable support all EE engineering processes seamlessly.
While IT systems and data standardization for Mechanical Engineering is proven in most application fields like the unique CAD system availability in an OEM engineering environment or standard CAD data quality commitments, the IT system standardization for EE Automotive Engineering urgently needs further improvement.
In this paper, a new integrated EE-IT platform for commercial vehicles engineering is presented. This EE-IT platform first takes into account that a proper component requirement management is mandatory. In accordance with EE Requirement management, IT systems must cover the core EE engineering fields EE Mechanics, Electrics and Electronics/Software. It will be shown which core data must be supplied at the interfaces between the different steps in the EE process chain. For practical commercial vehicle application examples, the impacts of commercial vehicle variation control on EE-IT platform and Engineering IT system design are shown. For electrical engineering, different IT system strategies are introduced. The impact of different IT strategies on worldwide data availability, electrical component supplier integration and global reuse of electrical component or design results between business partners are explained. Finally, any decision for a suitable EE-IT system strategy must be accompanied by cost-benefit assessments. For many OEMs, powerful database systems are already available for the global data accessing in Mechanical Engineering. Technical, organizational and financial aspects for an EE-IT strategy deployment and an IT system decision are outlined in detail.