Functional Concepts in the model of PGE – Product Generation Engineering by the Example of Automotive Product Development

摘要

Industry trends such as electro mobility, connected car, digital transformation and autonomous driving offer numerous new opportunities and potential for differentiating automotive vehicles. These trends are leading to a shift in customers' perception of product values and to a change of requirements for vehicle generations. Customers want to be fascinated by new product functions from a complete vehicle perspective such as Connected Traffic Sign and Light Recognition. This leads to a continuously increasing number of product functions in the future. In addition, already available product functions are extended by new or modified subfunctions (e.g. use of 'swarm' data for predictive traffic jam warning) or their functional quality is improved by e.g. increasing the effective field (e.g. more reliable traffic sign recognition). The principles of complex product functions, such as (partially) autonomous driving (e.g. highway pilot), remain largely hidden from the customer. The automotive product development of a German OEM was analyzed in order to specify the underlying reasons. In the vehicle development process, there is a heterogeneous understanding of the functional product concept in the development departments, whereby functional conflicts of objectives are often identified in the functional overall vehicle integration (e.g. physical pre-series prototypes). In comparison to the concept phase, however, the scope for change is limited to optimizing the application and oftentimes entails high change costs. Therefore, a coherent functional concept on the overall product level must be harmonized in the concept phase. This raises the question of how a uniform (cross-departmental) understanding of the functional product concept can be integrated into concept development to identify functional conflicts of objectives from the customer's perspective.For this purpose, requirements were derived for a consistent understanding of elements and approaches for functional concepts and insights were gained for different levels of abstraction. The contribution depicts a model derived from the requirements to specify a function-spanning product concept. In addition, the understanding of the function-specific concept of individual product functions is integrated in this model. The contribution is concluded by an evaluation of the developed model for a holistic understanding of the functional concepts at a German automotive Original Equipment manufacturer (OEM). The added value gained from a homogeneous understanding is shown in the overall collaboration, which enables communication across departmental boundaries at the same level in concept development. This allows product development to create transparency about product functions with regard to their impact on the customer.