Abstract
The automotive market demands attractive products and leads to a permanently rising variety of model versions. Besides the existing product lines increasing demands on legal regulations, environment, safety and comfort require new functionalities. This causes a high complexity and growing costs of the vehicle.
To be economically competitive the increasing costs of the vehicle have to be limited as much as possible. Component sharing contributes a lot to reduce the material costs of the vehicle. Additionally it is also necessary to minimize the development and fix costs of an organisation. To achieve this goal many actions has to be taken. One action is to use the Digital Prototype (DPT) during the product development.
At Porsche 14 Digital Prototypes are used to test and evaluate full vehicle functionalities with clear defined target areas. For example the Digital Prototype “Durability” is focussed to test and evaluate the body of the vehicle and the (DPT) “Control System” is needed to do the same for functions of chassis concepts, tires, powertrain and related control systems like PSM. Pedestrian Protection, Elastakinematics, Trimmed Body, NVH and CFD are also in charge to ensure the progress of the vehicle development. The Digital Prototypes will be shown and explained.
Working with the DPTs we recognize that build up, validation and use of the DPT need too much time. To make the DPT more powerful we identified the internal flow of data, called “data logistics” as one of the limiting factors. We implemented the IT-system “simulation data management” and achieved that data is temporally synchronized, the quality can be checked automatically and that the process is documented. In addition to this it was possible to parallelize the build up of the DPTs. The results of the implementation will be presented.
The competitiveness of the DPT is shown on the development of a new model. Comparing the process with additional use of the DPTs we achieved a development cost reduction of about roughly 15 %. Therefore it is very important that the importance of DPTs in the development and in the organization is accepted.
Further improvements by using the DPT need a significant change of processes. Project specifications have to be transferred to executable specifications, on those the DPT has to be built and tested. Depending on the use of the DPTs the results are presented in different ways. Therefore it was and is necessary to push new processes for animation, visualization and haptics. The strength of the DPTs is in an early project evaluation therefore in future we need methods to solve tasks with unsharp and not finalized date for the basic concept by a short response time.
Also the increasing influence of electronics for the full vehicle functionality has to be taken in consideration. The change by using the DPT leads to a new kind of development. The pieces of simulation have to be integrated in an full “integrated environment” with a continuous data logistic which is also synchronized to the real vehicle test and evaluation.
With the DPT the Digital Automotive Development has just started. Significant and additional change of process and engineering knowledge is needed to be successful in the future.