The automotive industry faces more pressure to innovate than ever. Traditional markets in the industrialized nations are saturated with vehicles, and customer expectations for innovative functionality are no longer restricted to premium cars. Emerging markets are highly competitive and vehicle makers strive for a competitive edge while aggressively containing costs.Virtually every area of the vehicle faces emerging technologies that add to the cost and complexity of development. Hybrid electrical vehicles and fuel-cell engines are changing the demands on development of power train systems. Active and passive safety features like ABS and Airbags are expected as standard equipment, even in small cars. Further safety improvements require innovative technology such as collision detection systems or night vision. The sophistication of navigation and entertainment systems is also accelerating, across all categories of vehicle. The common factor among all of these new and evolving systems is that they are all heavily dependent on software to function. Software has effectively become the driving force of innovation in many areas of technology and, in particular, in the form of embedded systems in vehicles.
Until the 1970s innovation was built on mechanical or hydraulic components. In September 1968 Citroen introduced their “curve light technology” with a Bowden cable connection between steering wheel and headlight. Bosch introduced the first electronic ABS that was ready for serial production 1978. By 1981, GM was using microprocessor-based engine controls executing about 50 000 lines of code across its entire domestic passenger car production. Since the late 1990s automotive innovation has been mainly based on software. Driver assistance systems like the autonomous cruise control technology that was introduced in 1998 would be impossible without software. This is a clear and continuing trend - according to a study conducted by the Center for Automotive Research, PriceWaterhouseCoopers, VDA and the city of Leipzig, electronics and software accounted for about 16 percent of a vehicle’s total value in 1990, increased to 25
percent by 2001 and by 2018, their share of a car’s total value is expected to climb to almost 55 percent.
As the amount and complexity of software in vehicles continued to grow, OEMs and suppliers realized the importance of software engineering as self-contained engineering discipline. Specific tools emerged to address the particular challenges of software development in the automotive industry. Change management and requirements management systems are well established at most automotive development organizations, as well as version control and configuration management tools. However, the majority of organizations are addressing these challenges with stand-alone or loosely coupled ‘suites’ of tools. This approach to management of the software engineering lifecycle poses significant risks and challenges, including:
> A lack of traceability across entities in the repositories, resulting in errors, rework, risk to quality and significant manual effort;
> Reuse is limited to entities in one repository, inhibiting collaboration and limiting the value of reuse;
> Process and information silos across the organization, which reduces visibility into project status and obscures the impact and cost of change; and
> A lack of support for cross domain product line management.
These outstanding risks and challenges continue to be strong barriers for the industry in general and these can be used as useful focal points for all ongoing endeavors by companies to revamp their businesses to attain a sustainable competitive advantage.
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