Many industries are facing rapid growth in the complexity of the systems they develop. In the automotive domain, vehicles are essentially becoming high performance computing platforms, comprised of dozens of electronic control systems (ECUs) that process over 100 million of lines of software code. In addition, Tens of thousands of vehicle product variants must be managed. One of the primary ways problems associated with increased system complexity can be mitigated so that products are delivered on time, on budget, and with minimal quality issues, is for engineering organizations to utilize the most effective systems engineering methodologies. Model based systems engineering (MBSE), implemented using languages like SysML, is one such methodology that has gained a foothold over the past 10-15 years and continues to be refined and improved today. This paper provides an overview of the general challenges systems engineering faces today including those associated with the automotive industry. Approaches based on MBSE are considered to address these challenges. Next, an enterprise-wide model-based engineering (MBE) strategy proposed by the aerospace and defense industry that could also be effectively utilized by automotive OEMs is discussed. Finally, a set of specific automotive applications of MBSE is described.

As the complexities of automotive systems increase, designing a system is a difficult task that cannot be done manually. In this paper, we focus on wire routing and wire sizing for weight minimization to deal with more and more connections between devices in automotive systems. The wire routing problem is formulated as a minimal Steiner tree problem with capacity constraints, and the location of a Steiner vertex is selected to add a splice which is used to connect more than two wires. We modify the Kou-Markowsky-Berman algorithm to efficiently construct Steiner trees and propose an integer linear programming (ILP) formulation to relocate Steiner vertices and satisfy capacity constraints. The ILP formulation is relaxed to a linear programming (LP) formulation which has the same optimal objective and can be solved more efficiently. Besides wire routing, wire sizing is also performed to satisfy resistance constraints and minimize the total wiring weight. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work in the literature to formulate the automotive routing problem as a minimal Steiner tree problem with capacity constraints and perform wire routing and wire sizing for weight minimization. An industrial case study shows the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm which provides an efficient, flexible, and scalable approach for the design optimization of automotive systems.

As the complexities of automotive systems increase, designing a system is a difficult task that cannot be done manually. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for weight minimization of wires used for connecting electronic devices in a system. The wire routing problem is formulated as a Steiner tree problem with capacity constraints, and the location of a Steiner vertex is selected for adding a splice connecting more than two wires. Besides wire routing, wire sizing is also done to satisfy resistance constraints and minimize the total wiring weight. Experimental results show the effectiveness and efficiency of our algorithm.

The automotive industry is introducing novel features, such as seamless vehicle-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-infrastructure connectivity to improve in vehicle driver safety (e.g., forward collision warnings) and comfort (e.g., routing to avoid congestion) while facing stricter government regulations, and shortened time-to-markets. As a result, automotive Electronic Control System (ECS) architectures are becoming increasingly complex. To cope with these challenges and opportunities, the entire automotive supply chain is engaged as follows: automotive OEMs are managing complexity by reusing legacy components and enabling new technologies; tier one suppliers are increasingly up-integrating features on the same computing platform; tier two suppliers are providing multi-core and other powerful technologies; academic institutions are doing research in new analysis, synthesis and optimization methods; and tool providers are trying to raise the level of abstraction for system modeling, analysis and optimization. The panel will address the following topics: