Managing Complex Data for Electrical/Electronic Components: Challenges and Requirements

In the automotive domain, innovation is driven by the introduction and continuous improvement of electrical and electronic (E/E) components (e.g. sensors, actuators, and electronic control units). This trend is accompanied by increasing complexity of interdependencies between these E/E components. In addition, external impact factors (e.g. changes of regulations) demand for more sophisticated E/E product data management (E/E-PDM). Since E/E product data is scattered over distributed heterogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases (e.g. consistency of artifacts, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units) are difficult to realize. Consequently, the partial integration of the corresponding application data models becomes necessary. Evolution of application data models is common in the context of E/E-PDM, but not considered by existing application integration approaches. Furthermore, no methodology for realizing application integration models exists. This paper elaborates the challenges to be tackled when integrating E/E product data from different applications. It further presents properties of the IT landscape involved in E/E-PDM and reveals occurring problems. Finally, requirements for E/E-PDM are discussed.