4422_WP_Smart_Engineering_EN_web__S.1-x

NEW PARAMETERS FOR ENGINEERS
NEW IMPACTS TO ENGINEERS
One of the really hot topics in the automotive industry is autonomous driving. Visionary
pioneers like Elon Musk as well as German industry experts talk about a revolution in industry
and society. This means that autonomous driving will not only fundamentally change the
driving experience, it will also change the car as an object to be purchased and used. It will
increasingly turn driving into a mobility service in the personal and commercial transport
sectors. In the sense of the “shared economy”, autonomous driving will make it far easier to
make the car available – autonomously – to other road users as a transport service during its
“downtime”, i.e. when its user is not using it.
However, to enable this type of usage scenario, it is vital that unmanned driving is made as
safe as possible. So the engineering input and software developments along that path occur in
a tense area involving on-board electronics and connectivity, software and smart algorithms in
the vehicle, and communication links between vehicles and an adequate IT infrastructure. This
infrastructure includes smart systems that communicate with vehicles and, for example, offer
and manage services.
As a result, vehicle electronics, on-board sensors and vehicle bus systems are becoming
increasingly complex, while driving functions run autonomously in the car and have to prove
themselves in traffic situations. So, for development, it is important that industry expertise
and digital technology expertise coalesce, i.e. that development teams incorporate digital
engineers working on big data architectures, signal data processing, data management in
data lakes and data analytics. And, secondly, the teams also need to incorporate automotive
engineers working on interpreting data and deriving conclusions as to what the data obtained
says about, for example, the quality of driving functions and driving behaviour, so that control
software can be modified.
In this segment the time-to-market is shrinking rapidly, and the battle to become the first automotive
manufacturer to be able to offer safe autonomous driving has long begun.
Execution speed for continuous software developments, implementation as well as operations,
have now also reached the automotive industry, and it will be a key success factor in the industry’s
future.
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