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

Abstract: 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 com-plexity of interdependencies between these E/E components. In addition, external im-pact 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 het-erogeneous IT systems, application-spanning use cases (e.g. consistency of artifacts, plausibility of logical connections between electronic control units) are difficult to re-alize. Consequently, the partial integration of the corresponding application data mod-els becomes necessary. Evolution of application data models is common in the context of E/E-PDM, but not considered by existing application integration approaches. Fur-thermore, 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.