Engineering Automotive Electronic Systems: Decision Support for Successful Integration

Development of a modern vehicle involves integration of components from several organizations. Many components are mechatronic which means that they include mechanical parts together with electronics that actively enhance some property of the component. The electronic system is increasingly important to product behaviour as vehicle functions control and coordinates more of these mechatronic subsystems. As the operational functionality increase, the amount of built-in functions for lifecycle support such as production tests and diagnostics also increase. Integrated electronic components assists in all these goals of the system. Achieving a successful integration where the components fit is accomplished in the development phases preceding the integration. Problems in integration often lead to severe delays close to the start of vehicle production. This thesis presents results on the subject of integration of automotive electronic systems. Our studies aim at providing knowledge on how to integrate automotive electronic systems successfully in a setting where vehicles are developed based on existing platforms. We focus on early phases of automotive electronic system development and in particular on the decisions taken in integration of electronic subsystems. The contribution is the presented support for making decisions to successfully integrate electronic systems for modern vehicles. The contribution includes an overview of driving factors of automotive electronics system design, a validated set of success practices for the integration of electronic components, and the proposal and demonstration of a decision model. The influential factors and the validated set of practices stems from case studies of products and projects while the proposed decision model is a result of combining two general models for architecture analysis and decision making, the Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method, ATAM and the Analytic Hierarchy Process, AHP. We demonstrate that choices in strategy and design preceding integration are central to achieve a successful integration. Our studies show that problems arise from omitted strategy decisions and we provide a checklist for decision making in the areas; functionality, platform, integration design, and assigning responsibilities. We provide a recommendation that we validate in a multiple cases study where fulfilment of recommendations is demonstrated to affect project success in integration projects. The potential gain for OEMs using our results lies in achieving more solid foundations for design decisions. Designers and managers could potentially find central decisions on integration strategy early that, if omitted, could cause delays. Thus, applying the result could avoid pitfalls and enable successful integration projects.