OBA

Problem description

Today, the architecture of vehicle electrical systems is largely an evolutionary process in which new or further developed vehicle electrical/electronic systems are integrated into the design concept, manufacturing concept and logistics concept of existing vehicle electrical system architectures from predecessor vehicles. Today's boundary conditions for the development of wiring system architectures, such as

• Cost pressure on the wiring system product,
• lack of installation space for electrics and electronics, with a simultaneous increase in the proportion of
• electronics and electrics in vehicles,
• reduction in consumption, i.e. saving weight in the wiring system architecture and
• the decreasing reliability of electrics and electronics due to the ever increasing
• increasing complexity,

require new methods in the development of vehicle electrical system architectures that consider the vehicle electrical system and electrics/electronics as a single unit and thus open the way to a global optimum of the electrical architecture in contrast to today's methods.

State of the art

Today's methods cannot provide an optimal solution for the above-mentioned problems in the development of an electrical system architecture, as they are limited to the optimization of sub-areas such as

• electronics (control units) or
• the communication of functions with each other or
• the functionality or
• the detailed optimization of the wiring systems is limited to predecessor vehicles

Aim of the work

The aim of this work is to develop a model of the vehicle electrical system architecture that

• describes the necessary design criteria for hardware, software and the vehicle electrical system,
• maps the influencing variables
• takes into account the requirements of mechatronic vehicle systems
• represents the interactions between environment, mechanics and electronics and
• allows mathematical optimization of the vehicle electrical system architecture.

Idea

The model of the vehicle electrical system architecture may only contain the technical and physical design criteria, influencing variables and interactions, so as not to create an image of the current development process and to restrict the optimization method to be selected too much. For the selection of the optimization algorithms, a manual examination of the optimization potential must be carried out with the help of the program to be created, which contains the model of the vehicle electrical system architecture and automated steps in the generation of architecture elements (cable routing, control units, etc.). The aim is to derive a suitable optimization method using heuristics.

Procedure

The project plan envisages three phases, which provide for different functionality of the program for optimizing vehicle electrical system architectures.

• Phase 1: Method for calculating the costs of a vehicle electrical system architecture
• Phase 2: Method for generating and calculating the costs of a vehicle electrical system architecture
• Phase 3: Method for generating and optimizing vehicle electrical system architectures