Evaluation and visualization of complexity in parameter setting in automotive industry

Parameter setting is a process primary used to specify in what kind of vehicle an electronic control unit of each type is used. This thesis is targeted to investigate whether the current strategy to measure complexity gives user satisfactory results. The strategy consists of structure-based algorithms that are an essential part of the Complexity Analyzer - a prototype application used to evaluate the complexity. The results described in this work suggest that the currently implemented algorithms have to be properly defined and adapted to be used in terms of parameter setting. Moreover, the measurements that the algorithms output has been analyzed in more detail making the results easier to interpret. It has been shown that a typical parameter setting file can be regarded as a tree structure. To measure variation in this structure a new concept, called Path entropy has been formulated, tested and implemented. The main disadvantage of the original version of the Complexity Analyzer application is its lack of user-friendliness. Therefore, a web version of the application based on Model-View-Controller technique has been developed. Different to the original version it has user interface included and it takes just a couple of seconds to see the visualization of data, compared to the original version where it took several minutes to run the application.