Steps and Iterations Involved in the Automotive Product Development

This chapter describes systems engineering process, systems engineering “V” model, vehicle attributes, and attribute engineering process. The systems engineering process begins with the understanding of customer needs. The customer needs are translated into vehicle attributes, i.e., the characteristics that the vehicle must have in order to sell well, which are used and managed during the vehicle development process to ensure that the vehicle possesses the attributes to satisfy its customers. The attribute management process involves development of requirements for the attributes, cascading the attribute requirements from the vehicle level to its lower levels (i.e., entities such as systems, subsystems, and components), allocating functions to all entities in the vehicle, developing test procedures to verify that each entity meets its requirements, and completing the verification and validation testing. The systems engineering process is iterative because many decisions that are made during the vehicle development process require consideration of alternative configurations of systems and system characteristics. The chapter also describes decomposition of vehicle systems into lower level systems. The systems decompositions help management of complex system development work by dividing it into manageable chunks of the vehicle to various design teams.