The automotive industry is electrifying a complex product. This has enormous technical, organisational, and economic consequences. To ensure that reliability is not left by the wayside, orientation is required: The reliability process.
The automotive industry is one of the largest and most mature mechatronic sectors. Strong competition has led to the increasing power density of combustion engines and to a large increase in the number of vehicle variants. The decade around 2010 saw the technological shift, first towards hybridised vehicles, and then from around 2020, at a large scale towards electric powertrain technology, primarily as BEV and alternatively also with fuel cells.
The parallel development and production of combustion engines, e-motors, fuel cells, li-ion batteries including power electronics and control technology represents a huge challenge for the integrative performance of OEMs, considering also that the supplier network has simultaneously changed significantly because of the technological disruption. At the end of the day, customers expect the accustomed level of reliability, even for the new technology. Hence development and manufacturing teams are under huge innovation and quality-related pressure. New technologies create a new risk landscape. This requires new simulation, test, and evaluation methods of verification and validation. In any cases, even the organisation needs restructuring so that the answers to relevant questions regarding the new technology are aligned.
Uptime ENGINEERING offers solutions for product development from verification, via validation, up to fleet analysis. They are bundled in a reliability process and are supported by the Uptime SOLUTIONS software suite. The interdisciplinary approach has proved itself, particularly for the challenges associated with disruptive technologies. The consistency of the methodology avoids the loss of information at the organisational and technical interfaces. The Uptime knowledge base provides effective support for a learning organisation.
