SYSTEMS ENGINEERING IN AN

AUTOMOTIVE E/E DESIGN WORLD

DR. NICK SMITH, PHD, MENTOR GRAPHICS

ABSTRACT
Demand for increased functionality in automotive electrical/electronic (E/E) systems is
being propelled by both customers and various governmental regulations and
requirements. This demand for more capabilities also introduces new challenges for
OEMs who are responsible for implementing these functions. Of course, the cost of
system development and manufacturing are considerable, but there are challenges
beyond cost that the OEM must deal with, such as increased weight, reliability and
quality concerns, exponentially-increasing complexity, and the government
requirements. From the point of view of the electrical system platform as a whole, it
provides the unique role of integrating all the individual E/E systems. When integrated,
unanticipated problems can emerge that require design modifications. Often, these are
discovered way down the design path, which results in delays in the program that can
lead to missed deadlines and costly rework. The increasing complexity, caused by the
number of configurations offered to customers, and cost of errors point to the value of
tackling this problem using a systems engineering approach. The systems engineering
methodology should allow OEMs to maintain product quality, reduce overall costs,
manage changes, and meet time-to-market goals. This paper will examine some of
these problems in more detail before exploring how system engineering can be used
to overcome these challenges.

This paper was originally presented at SAE World Congress,

April 2015. It is reprinted with permission of SAE.

E L E C T R I C A L & W I R E H A R N E S S D E S I G N

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The dilemma for automotive companies is about balancing risk to brand image of recalls with falling behind in the
adoption of customer centric technology and optimizing existing methods of delivering electrical systems. With
this paper we highlight that the technology for definition, verification and implementation of the solution can
enhance confidence in deploying advanced electrical systems rather than create new areas of concern.

The paper leverages our knowledge of how electrical systems are increasing, but also merging, with the needs of
global legislation created by ISO and others. These factors are corroborated by the findings of leading analysts and
give the reader a clear view of how they can define a plan for adopting these methods in an integrated and
managed risk approach.

ELECTRICAL SYSTEMS CONTRIBUTE WEIGHT AND COST TO THE VEHICLE

Wiring harnesses and electrical/electronic systems in today’s automobiles have added significantly to both weight
and cost of the completed vehicle. This is most true with luxury cars, equipped with all the latest features. With
those feature-laden cars, they can have as much as 10 miles and around 200 pounds of wiring. The increased
weight and cost of the wiring forces electrical platform designers to examine tradeoffs to arrive at the best balance
of cost, weight, and function.

COMPLEXITY COMPOUNDED BY CONFIGURATIONS

The more systems added to the vehicle, the more the complexity of both the design and the manufacturing of the
design increase. In today’s vehicles, an astonishing number of electronic modules are required to provide the
features and functions that the customers demand and regulations require. Some complex functions are
distributed among several electric control units (ECUs). Those luxury cars can have as many as 70 ECEs producing
more than 800 functions, and interconnected through five system busses.

As the number of circuits, busses and functions increase, so does the opportunity for unanticipated problems —
such as sneak circuits — where particular combinations of switches and loads can cause inadvertent operation, or
failure, of an electrical function.

The result of the sneak circuit can be as benign as a bewildered driver, to much more serious consequences such as
loss of a safety-critical function, and even a crash.

While it may be a surprise to many, the automobile has become the most sophisticated piece of consumer
electronics available. With that sophistication comes the opportunity to configure features in a multitude of ways.
The number of possible configurations of electrical systems has exploded with the plethora of features offered to
customers to raise value (and profit) and the need to meet safety, reliability, and emissions legislative requirements
such as ISO 26262 and the Euro 5/6 emission standards.

During the electrical design process, each step in the design is multiplied with each configuration, as shown in
Figure 1. Engineers are presented with a set of requirements associated with the overall platform which they
decompose through several stages; first, into individual features and then, the functions that implement the
features. Those functions are clustered into systems and allocated to physical devices or software. That embedded
software in most cars can contain as many as 100 million lines of code.

Next, the logical designs are associated with a mechanical definition of the overall vehicle and interconnected with
a physical wiring system, which is ultimately partitioned into harnesses. Each individual platform configuration has
its own unique harness, which can translate into thousands, even millions, of harnesses.

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Figure 1: This diagram illustrates that adding customer-selectable features to the automobile can quickly result in an incredibly
large number of possible configurations.

This configuration explosion affects the entire data flow from requirements to service documentation. Once sold,
OEMs are responsible for enabling efficient vehicle servicing across its life. Laws are increasingly demanding that
this data, specific to each unique vehicle configuration, be available to all dealers (not just the OEM network).

SYSTEMS ENGINEERING METHODOLOGY

Until very recently, each step of vehicle design has been an “island” with its own design tools and a complex local
dialect that describes the components, inputs, and outputs of the particular stage. Communication has often been
cumbersome, requiring conversions and/or manual data re-entry as the input to each step, resulting in redundancy
and delays.

These methods simply cannot meet today’s time, cost, and competitive pressures. Electrical design engineers need
to be able to share information with each other and with other “islands” to improve cross-team and cross-discipline
communication. They need to be able to more easily understand the context and effects of changes so that they
can be implemented faster and with fewer misunderstandings.

Today’s cycle time is too slow to compete effectively and meet demand. The process of creating a detailed wiring
design from the higher-level system design is repetitive and time-consuming, adding months to the design cycle.
The issues discussed here are increasing design and manufacturing cycle time while competition is increasing the
pressure to build the ideal electrical system faster. Adding these consumer-demanded electronics functions,
coupled with legislation and supply chain challenges, are giving impetus to process change.

Systems engineering can offer relief to those overwhelmed by modern vehicle development. Substantial evidence
shows the effectiveness of the systems engineering paradigm in managing complexity, with several key
characteristics: holism, abstraction, progressive integration, and interconnection.

Holism means that a problem is viewed in its entirety rather than as a set of isolated activities. In the vehicle E/E
context, this means linking engineering domains as diverse as embedded software design, electronic component
design, electrical distribution system design, and mechanical design.

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THE V DIAGRAM OF SYSTEMS DESIGN

Engineering designs have a fairly standard design life cycle. In systems engineering, the design life cycle is often
represented using a “V Diagram”. Figure 2 shows a complete V diagram with the steps enumerated.

Increasing complexity, managing the design and changes, and identifying problems early so that solutions are
quick and inexpensive requires a great deal of automation to deal with the complicated problems in a reasonable
amount of time.

Figure 2: The systems engineering methodology can be visualized with this V Diagram. A product is first visualized at a very high
level and requirements are generated. Then those requirements are decomposed to features, the features to functions. Next, a
logical design is done, followed by a physical design within the constraints of the platform. Then, components are designed at the
most detailed point, the bottom of the V. Then, the design is “re-composed” by building PCBs, then ECUs, the harnesses, etc. into
the final product.

A solution to this challenge is to implement a systems engineering methodology with advanced software that
provides digital continuity, requirements tracking, documentation, and design automation, and to apply the
systems “V” model in a multidisciplinary approach that covers each stage of the life cycle. In figure 2, the left side of
the V represents the decomposition of requirements and creation of system specifications. The right side of the V
represents integration of parts and their validation.

With this approach, data at a high level of abstraction is progressively decomposed and enriched to lower
abstractions until buildable components (software blocks, electronic components, and wire harnesses, etc.)
become fully defined. These components are then progressively integrated, with repeated verification steps until
the complete system is assembled. Transitions between abstractions can be automated through machine
executable specifications (a process known as synthesis), while full traceability is maintained, from requirement to
component implementation.

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AUTOMATION IS KEY
There are software packages available to implement the systems engineering methodology, including one from
Mentor Graphics. This software enables a systems engineering paradigm. Software automation to implement
systems engineering should provide a number of tools for the users. The rest of this section describes the
necessary tools that the package should deliver.

PLATFORM-LEVEL ABSTRACTION
Software should use a generative approach in which wiring designs are automatically generated from higher level
inputs, allowing “correct by construction” design creation. The software can automatically generate accurate wiring
designs for all allowable configurations at the platform level, shown in Figure 3.

Figure3: With automation, the system can be initially designed from a logical perspective. The software will “mature” the data as
the design process progresses.

This approach enables manufacturers to capture and develop their competitive intellectual property. System
integration is rapid, allowing a task that could take weeks to be accomplished in a few hours. This reduces electrical
design times and costs while letting designers explore alternative architectures.

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TOOL INTEGRATION
The software should provide tool suite that is a complete electrical design package and fits into the larger
ecosystem. It should be designed from the outset with an IT architecture that facilitates integration with third-party
MCAD, PLM, or ALM tools.

MANAGING CHANGE
The automation should allow multiple levels of abstraction and manage links between them so that changes can
be propagated throughout the various levels. Changes are propagated in a controlled and intelligent fashion,
ensuring that any value-add work previously done at lower levels of abstraction is retained.

With tight integration, changes

applicable to the electrical distribution
system can be coordinated with those
required in other disciplines to fully
implement the change: incorporating
changes efficiently, saving time and
supporting concurrent design.

DESIGN OPTIMIZATION
Engineers should be able to model
harness costs to the smallest detail and
create reports for comparing the costs
of various design choices in minutes
(Figure 4). They can create detailed and
accurate analysis of a wide range of
layout concepts within a few hours.
Studying tradeoffs quickly and
accurately saves money and weight on
every vehicle. Creating thousands,
sometimes millions, of electrical
designs for customer variants is
daunting, but with the software tools,
component layout and wiring can be
optimized simultaneously across
thousands of builds across a platform
program which results in better and
cheaper designs. Better design quality
cuts costs and risks.

TRACEABILITY
Users should be able to design process
controls to establish verifiable and
traceable release processes and design
revisions. The software should also
enforces specified constraints using
design rule checks.
Figure 4: System engineering software should allow easy comparison of tradeoffs
to allow engineers to quickly determine the most optimum design.

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FIND AND FIX PROBLEMS EARLY IN THE DESIGN

The best way to discover problems and provide their solution is early on in the design. At that point, changes can
be made quickly and the cost associated with the fix is generally orders of magnitude than had the problem been
discovered late in the process. With simulation, designs can be tested before the hardware stage and a problem
can be identified early, when it’s less expensive to fix. Software should provide rigorous failure-mode effect analysis
to identify problems that might only be found by a customer, at a huge cost to the manufacturer’s reputation and
profit.

MATURING DATA DURING THE DESIGN

Harness development is a transition point in the vehicle design and manufacturing process. It’s the environment in
which critical design data matures into a buildable product. The software tool suite must support this process by
enabling and imposing digital continuity. It spans process stages ranging from the earliest design effort (where
electrical functional requirements and physical requirements are captured) to implementation. The deliverable is a
completed harness product with thorough documentation to accompany it.

SUMMARY
Failure to recognize the special role that E/E systems play can lead to catastrophic results such as recalls and delays
that cost manufacturers dearly. For example, the Airbus wiring failure in the A380 jumbo jet that led to a huge
financial loss could fundamentally be described as an inability to manage digital continuity and the flow of
information between mechanical and electrical engineers. Worse it could have been avoided by the integration
and verification processes on the right side of the systems engineering V model.

Implementing a systems engineering approach can help vehicle manufacturers maintain quality and profitability
into the future. Mentor Graphics Capital tools enable successful change management by providing digital
continuity and design automation throughout the electrical platform, helping to manage the complexity and
challenge of ever-increasing electronics in vehicle designs.

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