Vehicle Electrics is a Key Player!

prostep ivip vec day

Today, for the fifth time the ProSTEP iViP / VDA VEC Day took place as an integral part of the annual Bordnetz-Kongress. Up to 70 participants listened to presentations from industry and IT representatives and realized that the new mobility concepts and the increase in products complexity require a shift toward model-driven vehicle electrics engineering, smart collaboration, information flows and data coherency.

The Vehicle Electric Container (VEC, VDA Recommendation 4968) is thereby seen as an information backbone. But one thing was also stated commonly: The journey has just started. Most of the tools currently available are poor in supporting market requirements. But things are changing. The today presented IT solutions, first productively used implementations of pioneers like BMW and Volkswagen are very promising.

Vehicle Electrics is a key player. And it’s worth to invest into vehicle electrics (in German: Bordnetz) and related IT solutions!

With this statement, Dr. Martin Pöschl from BMW opened his presentation and summarized the spirit with regard to a topic which was so often dismissed in the past. Together with Markus Reichelt from EK Design, Martin gave insight into first result of BMW’s project Future Cable: a powerful component database which supplies engineering-relevant data. The driver for this project is to increase efficiency. Efficiency of the product on the one hand (the energy demand of a new 7 series car e.g. is 50% less than its predecessor). The efficiency of the processes on the other hand.

Zoran Stjepanovic from TE Connectivity then changed the perspective and reported about experiences gained in a pilot application for component data exchange between BMW and TE Connectivity via VEC.

The necessity for a model-based vehicle electrics engineering for the globally active supplier Delphi was highlighted by Thomas Bolte – especially in collaboration scenarios with engineering partners where handling changes is daily business.

Dr. Clemens Reichmann from Vector Informatik underlined the requirement for model-based engineering and presented solutions. Benefits can be gained in every phase of the engineering, complexity can be covered and the quality in collaborations can be boosted.

The VEC provides a pragmatic information backbone in many vehicle electrics engineering scenarios. How important data coherency and realizing smart data flows are in the electrical design was impressively presented by Martin O’Brian from Mentor Graphics.

A roundtrip with regard to VEC-related standardization work was given by Jorgos Kyriazis from Volkswagen. Jorgos made this presentation as the speaker of the relevant ProSTEP iViP / VDA Project Groups “Product Data Model for Vehicle Electric Systems (PDM4VES)” and the ECAD Implementor Forum.

For industry, the role of the product model more and more moves into focus!

Within the past years the groups reached impressive results – which are pragmatic and streamlined for easing industrial application. Within the next steps, the experiences gathered in productively used applications and pilots will be the basis for enhancements of the VEC as well as the complementarily provided guidelines, added Johannes Becker from 4Soft. This includes updates of tutorials provides via the ECAD Wiki too.

But, what do new methodologies and IT solutions for smart vehicle electrics engineering help, if there are no engineers available to apply them? With regard to this, Prof. Mathias Rausch from the University of Applied Sciences Landshut introduced the new master degree course Vehicle Electrics Engineering, which was initiated by BMW, Dräxlmaier, Kromberg & Schubert, LEONI, Nexans and Yazaki.

The VEC Day 2016 was really an interesting event. The presentations will be available at the ProSTEP iViP Website soon. Thanks to all presenters and for the vivid contributions from the audience.

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