Design of Next Generation Automotive Systems: Challenges and Research Opportunities

The automotive industry is undergoing a massive transformation, driven by the mega-trends of “CASE”: connected, automated, shared, and electric. These trends are affecting the nature of automobiles, both internally and externally. Internally, the transition from internal combustion engines (ICE) to electric drive-trains has resulted in a shift from hardware-defined vehicles to software-defined vehicles (SDVs), where software is increasingly becoming the dominant asset in the automotive value chain. These trends are leading to new design challenges such as how to manage different configurations of design, how to decouple the design of software and services from hardware, and how to design hardware to allow for upgrades. Externally, automobiles are no longer isolated products. Instead, they are part of the larger digital ecosystem with cloud connectivity. Vehicle usage data are increasingly connected with smart factories, which creates new opportunities for agile product development and mass customization of features. The role of the human driver is also changing with increasing levels of autonomy features. In this paper, the authors discuss the ongoing transformation in the automotive industry and its implications for engineering design. The paper presents a road map for engineering design research for next-generation automotive applications.