Reduce electrical/electronic complexity in aerospace and automotive

The automotive and aerospace industries are seeing unprecedented growth in the development of innovative vehicles and other products. With a variety of top-level trends driving new, complex and even competing requirements for these products, many manufacturers are looking for ways to streamline their design and development processes. As companies consider targeted investments for improvements, they must examine their specific needs.

This brief, Mitigating E/E Systems Complexity in the Automotive and Aerospace Industries, details how companies are meeting these challenges successfully. It offers more detail on the issues driving increased complexity in the automotive and aerospace industries. Then it explores the rising need for collaboration across supply chains and engineering teams to mitigate complexity and discusses the role of software-as-a-service (SaaS) solutions as a powerful enabler.

What are the challenges faced by the aerospace industry?

When it comes to challenges, there are many similarities in the aerospace and automotive industries. A combination of eco-friendly requirements, regulations, and incentives – not to mention consumer demands – continue to push the ongoing electrification of systems. The complexity of electrical/electronic (E/E) systems architecture and electrical systems is growing at a startling rate in the automotive and aerospace industries. The proliferation of intelligent components such as electronic control units (ECUs), line-replaceable units (LRUs), sensors, battery systems, and electric powertrains means systems are demanding more and more power – and heightened connectivity capabilities – to work as designed.

In aerospace, safety and sustainability needs are the forces propelling change in product design. Safety has long been a primary factor in developing aerospace, aviation, and defense systems. Passengers and flight crews must come first, which means engineers need to take a long, hard look at any new features or systems with the potential to interfere with that mission. There is also an increased need for more sustainable systems.

Collaboration across supply chains and engineering teams

New IT solutions address challenges in collaboration across supply chains and engineering teams. The pandemic and other 2020 disruptions have hindered the ability to connect to and collaborate between different on-premises systems across supply chains, especially in the light of new, work-from-home norms. Given changes to employee working arrangements, including the shift to working from home, engineers across supply chains need a reliable way to communicate in order to develop lightweight, high-bandwidth, variant-specific E/E systems.

SaaS for electrical design

Today’s products, particularly in the automotive and aerospace realms, demand quite a bit from engineering organizations. As the complexity of new products grows, so does the time and effort required to develop a feasible design. A main design challenge engineers face as they develop lightweight, high-bandwidth, variant-specific E/E systems is finding a viable solution that will meet all requirements. Meeting such competing and conflicting requirements involves a lot of exploration and iteration to test different system trade-offs.

A SaaS solution for electrical design offers value by providing built-in best practices to govern the automated workflows for design and engineering tasks. Some have interactive capabilities, allowing engineers to tweak and test their models as they go. Other solutions are fully automated, directing the process solely based on information inputted by the engineering team. SaaS applications allow engineers to explore, modify and ultimately, uncover the right E/E systems architecture for every single variant in far less time than traditional, manual methods. Please read the brief for the full details.

What are the main challenges in the automotive industry?

In the automotive industry, these trends directly translate to competing and increasingly complex requirements for E/E systems. In fact, respondents in the 2020 Lifecycle Insights Engineering Executive’s Strategic Agenda study stated that the complexity of the design domains in E/E systems is growing.

• 58 percent of respondents stated that electrical distribution system complexity is increasing or increasing greatly.
• 66 percent state that the complexity of electronic hardware is increasing or increasing greatly.

Download the PDF to learn more.