Development of a flexible digital thread for managing system performance simulation at Toyota Motor Europe

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ABSTRACT

As global and many new automotive companies pin their futures on
Electric Vehicles (EVs) and drive towards a portfolio dominated by them in this
decade, doing business as usual is no longer feasible. The multidisciplinary
nature of EVs, with a focus on electronics, sensors and software, clearly point
the way away from the mechanical focus of the past. Throw in the modern reality
of international supply chains, and you are faced with a real problem achieving
the critical task of capturing, disseminating, and communicating product
requirements and functionality. This miscommunication of product intent leads
to many costly errors and time delays across the entire product lifecycle,
including products operating in the field – however, errors in early design
decisions are known to be the most expensive.

PLM platforms and especially the approach required during the conceptual architecture and design phase, must transform to meet these new, more-demanding products.

Automotive development needs to satisfy an ever-increasing number of conflicting requirements. Specialists from different engineering backgrounds have traditionally dealt with them using standardised methods developed in each domain over the years. Model Based Development (MBD) envisions the holistic development of the vehicle and its subsystems by coherent application of simulation; it is well suited to front-load development processes and to manage such increasing complexity.

The effective application of MBD poses at least two sets of challenges: on the one hand, the organization should entrust and correctly understand the capability of available simulation methods, which is related to maturity of technical development and application practice; on the other hand, it should have developed infrastructure and processes to apply simulation seamlessly, in terms of quality and resources.

The MBD team at Toyota Motor Europe R&D is responsible for technical development of simulation methods and their deployment to vehicle development projects. We have recently demonstrated the potential of a flexible and scalable system-centric digital thread for non-geometric engineering specifications; a solid data model is the necessary basis to design efficient and automated digital processes, enhancing engineering collaboration across domains.

After this first pilot implementation, TME is now working on the extension to simulation processes with the same flexibility and scalability. This presentation will define the overall vision of the engineering data management solution, its extension to SPDM and results that have been measured.