Continuous Product Updates under Consideration of HW-and SW-Releases: The Potential of Product Structuring Concepts

The automotive industry is undergoing a transformation driven by rapid developments in technologies, business models and mobility concepts. As a result, customers are increasingly demanding additional, improved, or customized functionalities, services, and features of vehicles. Consequently, the number of functions, electronic control units, and software is increasing, through which modern cars are becoming complex cyber-physical systems. This transition from mechanically-based to software-intensive, intelligent systems provides extensive opportunities for enhancing vehicles but also presents organizational challenges in their planning, development, and approval. To address these challenges, the automotive industry is adopting methods such as product generation, electrics/electronics (E/E) platforms, and software product line engineering. Although these concepts are well-established and widely acknowledged in their respective research areas and various domains, there is limited practical effectiveness when it comes to implementing these concepts, especially in the context of software-driven automotive systems. Additionally, most of the requirements, such as vehicle's systems safety and security and software maintenance using over-the-air updates, are getting more important with the change of vehicles becoming digital smart devices on wheels. Our methodology starts with an investigation of existing product-structuring concepts that consider both hardware and software artifacts to derive the challenges and practical applicability to the automotive industry, as well as other cyber-physical systems, by applying a systematic mapping study. Based on the findings of the mapping study regarding challenges and issues of product-structuring concepts related to software-driven automotive systems, we analyze, discuss, and evaluate the requirements within our research group to develop specific criteria. These criteria form the basis for developing an assessment method to support the practical applicability of product-structuring concepts and decision making in managing electric/electronic platforms.