Vehicle functionality - Why we need a structured development process

In the early days of vehicle engineering, the car was designed top-down. Most design decisions were taken bearing the complete vehicle in mind. As sub-systems have become more complex, and also deeply interlinked, the width of the problem has become impossible for one engineer to understand in all aspects. To be able to cope with this, vehicle manufacturers have created stable partitionings of the vehicle, and organized the development organization around this. However, this has led to a static design process, where some decisions do not have to be taken as they are already given. This in turn means that local sub-optimizations are favoured, whereas completely new solutions on the vehicle level are unlikely to appear. To counter this, the author suggests that a reference architecture is created. This would allow all phases of the design process to share the same information set and design rules. Volvo Car Corporation has been using reference architectures for some years. The paper explains the theoretical background to why this step was taken.