Rational automotive industry solutions

The ability to manufacture new vehicle models, including those based on new technologies, such as battery and hybrid drives, play a critical role in the future. However, the problems inherent to working with these new technologies, dealing with increased product complexity, and meeting strict compliance and safety standards can make completing projects on time and within budget problematic.

The key to efficient and effective product development is to take a systems engineering approach, which integrates multiple engineering disciplines into a structured development process. Only with a structured approach that incorporates all specialized teams can manufacturers hope to satisfy both the business and technical needs for a new vehicle.

The IBM® automotive systems engineering and product lifecycle management solutions enable your organization to:

• Improve requirements engineering

• Manage complexity with model-driven systems development

• Advance product portfolio management

• Manage change in a globally distributed environment with integrated product change management

• Integrate quality management into your engineering processes

• Improve your systems software delivery capabilities

• Requirements engineering

  IBM requirements engineering solutions help you manage your customer, marketplace, and system requirements and understand how they flow to software, mechanical, and electrical sub-systems. With solution support of the automotive-industry-specific Requirements Interchange Format (RIF) in IBM Rational® DOORS® automotive OEMs and suppliers can more effectively collaborate and exchange requirements information.

• Model-driven systems development

  IBM model-driven systems development (MDSD) solutions can help you manage complexity, lower costs, and reduce time to market. Models help teams communicate more effectively and can help you integrate and test your automotive products much earlier in the development lifecycle. MDSD goes beyond the development of embedded software and in-vehicle electronics systems, such as electronic control units and the electronic board network. It also supports the logical modeling of entire vehicles and their functions using a holistic mechatronic and system-of-systems approach. IBM Rational Rhapsody® is the core product of our MDSD solution.

• Product, project and portfolio management

  Whether you are an OEM planning new vehicle platforms and models or a supplier planning automotive components or embedded software, you need to make decisions on product features and portfolios that can determine the ultimate success, or failure, of your business. IBM Rational product, project, and portfolio management solutions can help you to make better decisions in difficult product portfolio trade-off discussions by offering best practice guidance and measurement capabilities.

• Integrated product change management

  Change can originate from a variety of sources throughout the product development lifecycle. With IBM integrated product change management solutions, you can manage changes no matter where they come from—software, electronics, mechanical, or elsewhere—and enable communication, collaboration, impact analysis, and tracking capabilities whenever and wherever necessary. These anytime, anywhere change management capabilities reduce the time needed to propagate change information to the various design teams and facilitate a better understanding of how requirements and product changes can impact schedules.

• Quality management

  Ensuring and managing quality throughout a vehicle’s lifecycle from initial concept to the finished product is a multilayered problem that involves all engineering disciplines, manufacturing, and service-after-sales. Increasingly, OEMs and suppliers are faced with quality issues arising from the growing amount of electronics used in automobiles. The IBM Rational quality management solutions enable you to lower these costs by making quality management an integrated element in all development phases.

• Automotive systems and software delivery platform

  The IBM automotive systems and software delivery platform enables you to coordinate distributed teams to define, build, manage, test, and deliver automotive in-vehicle embedded software more quickly and effectively. These solutions provide comprehensive, integrated support throughout the embedded software development and delivery lifecycle, helping to manage the ever-increasing complexity of automotive projects.