State-of-the-Art Tools and Methods Used in the Automotive Industry

Author(s):  
Harald Altinger
Author(s):  
Cyril Picard ◽  
Jürg Schiffmann

Abstract Automated design tools are seldom used in industry. Their potential, however, is high, especially in companies mostly active in variant design, where custom tools could help cut down development time in the early stages. The design of geared electro-mechanical actuators for the automotive industry is such a case. These actuators are simple examples of coupled multi-disciplinary systems that can be hard to design, since they need to follow strict specifications in terms of performance and packaging. This paper presents an automated design and optimization tool tailored for such systems based on an integrated modeling approach, multi-objective optimization and an interactive reporting tool. The focus is set on the impact of system-level constraints on the usability by industry of the generated designs. In two case studies, the tool is able to find competitive actuator candidates that are cheaper (−3.6% and −11%) and more compact than similar existing products in less than an hour on a state-of-the-art laptop computer. More powerful options or actuators using different technologies have also been proposed. Compared to optimizations done without system-level constraints, the generated actuators are immediately usable by engineers to get accurate insights into the design problem and promote informed decision-making.


Author(s):  
Jian Cao ◽  
Zhong Wang ◽  
Neil Krishnan ◽  
Anthony Michael Swanson

In the last ten years, miniaturization technologies have revolutionized product design and have lead to many innovative applications in the automotive industry, healthcare, environmental monitoring, industrial processing, energy consumption, defense, etc. Here, the current state-of-the-art in mesoforming (forming of metals in the scale of 0.1 mm to several millimeters) is reviewed, followed by our preliminary investigation of one mesoforming example.


2014 ◽  
Vol 1063 ◽  
pp. 232-236 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jia Zhou ◽  
Ming Tu Ma

EuroCarBody, offer the most important forum for defining and discussing the state of the art in modern series car body engineering. The present paper concerns the materials of press hardened steels and its’ manufacturing technology (Hot stamping) applied on vehicle on EuroCarBody from 2009 to 2013 through presentations and benchmark datas. The using percentage of press hardening steels (PHS) on body in white (BIW) are summarized and analyzied. It can be noted that the number and weight of BIW parts using of press hardening steels are increasing from 2009 to 2013, some kind of vehicle, such as Audi A3, the using percentage of PHS reaches 21.6%. The press hardening steels have started used on commercial vehicle from EuroCarBody 2013. More and more new technologies applied on hot stamping processing, such as Joule heating for hot stamping, Hot-form-process partial tempering, Tailor Rolled Blank (TRB) technolgy, etc. With the developing of the automotive industry, more and more hot forming parts will be applied on vehicles in the future.


Author(s):  
J. PERNSTÅL ◽  
A. MAGAZINIUS ◽  
T. GORSCHEK

The automotive industry is facing a tremendous growth in the engineering of software-intensive systems, giving rise to various challenges. To prevent problems related to the fit of new software technologies in vehicles and the manufacturing processes, a well functioning interaction between the functions for product development and manufacturing is crucial. This is complicated by the fact that the changeable nature of software development causes unprecedented needs for collaboration and coordination between these two functions. This paper reports on a process assessment that focuses on the interface between the functions for product development and manufacturing in the development and design of software-intensive automotive systems. The main purpose of the study was to identify the key issues for improvement in the area assessed. The assessment was performed at two Swedish automotive companies where data were collected from documents and in interviews with practitioners. Nine key improvement issues were established ranging from challenges in requirements engineering to the need for knowledge transfer between manufacturing and product development. In addition, to increase the understandability of the results and map possible avenues for solution and future research, the paper provides an extensive analysis of each improvement issue in relation to the state-of-the-art.


Author(s):  
Julien Garcia ◽  
Dominique Millet ◽  
Pierre Tonnelier

This paper lies within the integration of an eco-design method adapted to the Innovation structure at a car manufacturer. The environmental constraints in the automotive industry are more and more important (European emission standards for exhaust emissions, European directive on end-of life vehicles …). Eco-design is a new manner to design products related to the concept of sustainable development, which combines economy and ecology and put the environmental criterion alongside the classical criterions of design. The goal of this study is to identify the specifications of a strategy for integrating the dimension “Environment”. This strategy is applied in the innovation process thanks to eco-design tools which are the learning vectors for an organization, and therefore support a learning process. This process is structured with the interactions between the management of firm, the environment department, and the design team. Therefore we first make a synthesis of the different classifications of eco-design tools and use two categories: diagnosis and improvement. Second, as our goal is the integration in the Innovation structure and within a design process, we analyze some design process models and highlight the RID (Research, Innovation structure, Development) concept. Third, the main practices of several car makers are synthetized and a focus on three of them (Volvo, Ford, and Volkswagen) is made; we link their strategies with the concept of RID. Finally in the fourth part, we propose a model of a strategy for integrating eco-design practices based on the three examples and supported by a learning process.


This chapter describes the state-of-the-art technologies, tools, and methods that are closely connected to the work done in this book. The chapter describes in detail the key components of the process mining and semantic modelling methods and the different technologies that enable the practical application of the techniques. In essence, the chapter explains the main tools and mechanisms that are applied in this book, ranging from the events log to the different tools that are applied for process mining, and the existing algorithms used to discover the process models and to support the interpretations and/or further analysis of the models at semantic levels.


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