IBM Software Rational

Automotive

Five key areas for accelerating automotive innovation

Enabling smarter automotive product and systems engineering processes

Five key areas for accelerating automotive innovation

Introduction
The number of lines of code in todays automobiles rivals the code found in fighter jets, with 50 or more networked electronic control units (ECUs) to execute the code. Rapid innovations in electrical and electronic (E/E) systems are now the norm. For example, in just the past few years, collision avoidance systems that share information with radar and braking systems have become increasingly common. These onboard systems are also being integrated with external systems and services, such as crash response and roadside assistance. The automotive industry is extremely competitive, requiring original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) and automotive suppliers around the world to strive for innovation and gains in cost efficiency. Just surviving in this climate is challenging and requires rapid progress, but to stand out or gain market share that takes something consistently special, year after year. This white paper explores some key challenges automotive companies face in creating smarter, more sophisticated automobiles that are made up of many systems of systems along with how a more holistic approach can help accelerate innovation while improving quality.

The new realities require more coordinated, collaborative and traceable processes across the product development lifecycle to help contain costs, optimize time to market, and support compliance with regulations and standards.
Shifting to a comprehensive systems and software engineering approach

IBM believes automotive OEMs and suppliers need to mature their software engineering and embrace systems engineering to manage the increasing complexity. Software engineering is essential to deliver the innovation provided by the E/E components. Systems engineering, defined as a multidiscipline approach to creating a system or product that includes mechanical components, hardware, software, people and information, is essential for a number of reasons:

Addressing compounding complexities

Bringing an automotive product or component to the marketplace can involve complex requirements that must be addressed by numerous teams spread across different departments, companies and geographies. For products or components that are part of a larger system, significant development obstacles quickly add up. And for an entire vehicle, the challenges become exponentially more complex, with major implications on time to market and manufacturing costs.

It empowers organizations to manage links within E/E development as well as in relation to mechanical, hydraulic and fluid engineering components. It serves as an umbrella discipline to coordinate and facilitate communication among the different engineering disciplines that have different processes and priorities. It allows for optimization at the product level instead of the discipline level, which is important for better controlling overall costs and quality. For example, a team that decides to change a windshield wiper fluid reservoir design to save five cents needs to confer with other disciplines. Otherwise, the change could result in 20 dollars in added costs resulting from the need to reroute wiring and modify software to address latency problems in ECUs associated with the design change.

IBM Software

The large number of heterogeneous technologies and systems in automotive manufacturing environments can make process alignment in support of software and systems engineering exceedingly complicated. In response, IBM has developed an open, standards-based, extensible collaboration and integration platform designed to support a more unified approach to product engineering. The IBM approach provides a rapid and cost-effective means for transforming processes in five key areas in support of an effective E/E engineering lifecycle management solution.

The IBM approach

The requirements management solution from IBM helps teams more easily and accurately capture, organize and link hundreds of thousands of requirements. It supports collaborative requirements analysis and management between suppliers and OEMs. Requirements are traced through the lifecycle data, so requirements changes can be assessed more quickly with a greater understanding of the effect of the proposed change. Automating this analysis allows teams to focus on critical tasks rather than tracking down and managing data. Executable requirement models complement traditional text-based requirements because they allow teams to find requirements conflicts, errors or omissions early in the development cycleand help prevent costly late-stage rework or warranty issues.

Key area 1: requirements management

As vehicles grow more complex, effectively managing requirements across the lifecycle has become essential to creating high-quality, successful end products. Everyone working on a project must be attuned to requirements and focused on meeting them. There is virtually no room for error because the consequences of a poorly expressed requirement can be devastating; it can have a domino effect that leads to timeconsuming rework, inadequate deliveries and budget overruns. Poorly managed requirements may also result in compliance failures and have other far-reaching consequences on consumers and the brand. Given the stakes, internal development teams, suppliers and business partners need to clearly understand what they are building throughout the development lifecycle, be alerted to requirements changes as soon as possible and ultimately be able to clearly understand whether all requirements have been fulfilled. Its important to find a solution that can address domain-specific needs while supporting a real-time flow of information and ideas across domains so that stakeholders can keep an eye on the bigger picture.

Key area 2: traceability

Change is inevitable in the development lifecycle of a complex vehicle. Finding a way to manage, track and collaborate on changes is essential. Whether the change is a requirement or a design change, it must be coordinated within the design chain. Traceability across the value chain for software, electronic systems and mechanical parts is key to managing changeand to improving product quality. Effective traceability enables visibility for effective, timely decision making and facilitates compliance with process improvement approaches such as Capability Maturity Model Integration (CMMI) and Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination (SPICE).

Five key areas for accelerating automotive innovation

Providing stakeholders with the information they need to make better decisions can reduce development times, lower risk and improve customer satisfaction. Yet achieving traceability across the automobile development lifecycle is complicated because it involves maintaining links between requirements, change requests, issues, versions of directories, files and design artifacts from multiple disciplines that may have been affected.
The IBM approach

The IBM approach

IBM can provide an unambiguous, near-real-time view of the effects of changeoften with little overhead for the developer or project managerthrough a linked data approach. Based on the same concept that links content on the Internet, teams can analyze and query data and relationships to gain real-time visibility into issues that have been corrected, work currently in progress, and how previous problems were resolved and by whom. The linked data approach also provides a way for engineers to trace large volumes of features back to requirements and other lifecycle data to help with change impact analysis, enabling them to reuse requirements for common components across multiple product lines for cost savings.

The integrated, open-standards-based IBM solution supports improved communication and collaboration among globally distributed engineering teams and suppliers. Requirements delivered as documents and returned with markups require a lot of time and manual work to process. IBM provides the ability to share requirements electronically through industry standards to more efficiently collaborate and manage requirements in the supply chain. The change and project management components of the solution can give visibility into the supply chain to help manage project risks. Sharing information helps increase the likelihood that individual teams will get specifications right from the beginning; that each side is working on the correct, approved set of requirements; and that adjustments can be made quickly as requirements change.

Key area 4: standards and compliance

Adoption of auto industry platforms such as the AUTomotive Open System Architecture (AUTOSAR) and compliance with standards such as CMMI, SPICE or ISO 26262 requires investment, leading to higher costs and pushing already strained resources. Suppliers must find ways to automate platform adoption and compliance efforts to help jump-start delivery for higher quality components.
The IBM approach

Key area 3: supply chain collaboration

Development complexity increases with the number of contractors in the supply chain developing subsystems that must interact with other systems to deliver features (such as collision avoidance). Reducing development cost and managing complexity requires close communication and integration between OEMs and their suppliers. Suppliers need to align design and product development with rapidly changing OEM requirements while increasing product quality and reducing time to market and cost.

IBMs open, extensible platform helps facilitate compliance with standards by facilitating incremental adoption of new processes and infrastructure within existing environments, especially when used in conjunction with best practices and process guidance. Our approach connects a heterogeneous engineering environment and doesnt require you to move all data into one repository.

IBM Software

Because of the time and labor-intensive nature of compliance processes, the IBM solution provides automated enforcement of lifecycle processes and built-in reporting capabilities that are essential to streamlining processes and reducing costs. Predefined templates for ISO 26262 processes and AUTOSAR along with automated traceability and test result report generation capabilities can help you reduce the time, effort and cost of compliance.

In essence, Rational tools and processes can support a reusecentric development process that allows for the same basic architecture for E/E systems to be reused across multiple vehicles. By virtually eliminating the need to develop and maintain multiple detached systems in parallel, organizations can reduce costs and improve efficiencies in ways that would otherwise not be possible.

Key area 5: innovation

To reduce costs and manage complexity as the rate of innovation in embedded devices increases, automotive manufacturers require a more disciplined, integrated approach to component engineering with suppliers. Suppliers need to be able to align closely with rapidly changing OEM specifications to deliver the right high-quality component each time. Historically, software development was not a primary skill, and organizations managed to make do with cobbled together teams and processes. Now, however, demands for software innovation are outpacing the ability of many organizations to deliver. To stay competitive and support rapid, efficient innovation, organizations must consider software development as core to their business.
The IBM approach

Accelerate the adoption of smarter practices

In the race to cost-effectively and efficiently deliver innovative, high-quality automobiles, the right capabilities can make all the difference. So the faster you can expand from traditional mechanical engineering practices to include electronic and embedded software development the better. Integrated system and software engineering solutions that provide capabilities for addressing the complexities of a rapidly accelerating technology curve are becoming critical to sustaining competitive advantages. As a system and software solution provider, IBM can provide a powerful, comprehensive, open-standards-based solution to help your company address todays and tomorrows major challenges in automotive product and systems engineering. Our solutions are designed to help you:

IBM Rational tools can help automotive software makers develop innovative software faster. The integrated toolset helps ensure that you can rapidly track and close out changes to software. More effective OEM and supplier collaboration can not only make it easier for suppliers to deliver the right component the first time, but it can also help improve quality while reducing turn times.

Optimize engineering costs within complex distributed E/E engineering supply chains Reduce the risk of quality issues while helping speed time to market Achieve compliance with ISO 26262 for safety-related E/E systems More easily migrate to standard platforms such as AUTOSAR or GENIVI Demonstrate system and software engineering maturity through Automotive SPICE and CMMI

For more information

To learn more about IBM Rational solutions for the automotive industry, contact your IBM sales representative or IBM Business Partner, or visit: ibm.com/software/rational/solutions/automotive/ Additionally, IBM Global Financing can help you acquire the software capabilities that your business needs in the most cost-effective and strategic way possible. Well partner with credit-qualified clients to customize a financing solution to suit your business and development goals, enable effective cash management, and improve your total cost of ownership. Fund your critical IT investment and propel your business forward with IBM Global Financing. For more information, visit:
ibm.com/financing
Copyright IBM Corporation 2013 IBM Corporation Software Group Route 100 Somers, NY 10589 Produced in the United States of America January 2013 IBM, the IBM logo, ibm.com, and Rational are trademarks of International Business Machines Corp., registered in many jurisdictions worldwide. Other product and service names might be trademarks of IBM or other companies. A current list of IBM trademarks is available on the web at Copyright and trademark information at ibm.com/legal/copytrade.shtml This document is current as of the initial date of publication and may be changed by IBM at any time. Not all offerings are available in every country in which IBM operates. The client examples cited are presented for illustrative purposes only. Actual performance results may vary depending on specific configurations and operating conditions. THE INFORMATION IN THIS DOCUMENT IS PROVIDED AS IS WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING WITHOUT ANY WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND ANY WARRANTY OR CONDITION OF NON-INFRINGEMENT. IBM products are warranted according to the terms and conditions of the agreements under which they are provided. The client is responsible for ensuring compliance with laws and regulations applicable to it. IBM does not provide legal advice or represent or warrant that its services or products will ensure that the client is in compliance with any law or regulation. Please Recycle

RAW14320-USEN-00