Function-oriented development with 3D VR-methods

FuncDevVR

New Methodologies for Automotive PLM by combining Function-oriented Development with 3D CAD and Virtual Reality

Today, a primary challenge within the automotive industry is the high and further increasing complexity of modern vehicles, caused by the growing numbers of vehicle functions, electronics and software. Considering such challenges, the approach of a function-oriented development extends the traditional component-oriented development by focusing an interdisciplinary development of vehicle functions as mechatronic and cyber-physical systems and it is an important measure to master the increasing product complexity. In addition, technologies like virtual reality, computer-aided design (CAD) and virtual prototyping offer largely established tools for the automotive industry in order to handle different challenges across product lifecycle management. So far, however, the promising potentials of 3D virtual reality methods have not yet been evaluated in the context of an automotive function-oriented development. Therefore, this research focuses on the question how 3D virtual reality methods can improve relevant workflows and generally streamline a function-oriented development.

To address this research goal, a prototypical implementation is developed which is based on a consistent integration of vehicle function architectural data with 3D CAD data. A primary contribution of this thesis is the development and evaluation of novel, function-oriented 3D methods which are enabled by this kind of data integration. Based on the prototypical implementation, these methods are designed, developed and evaluated. With the application on different automotive use cases it is shown that these novel 3D methods provide a significant benefit for function-oriented development and comparable applications of systems engineering. Moreover, proposals are provided on how these methods can be integrated into prospective 3D tools in order to solve relevant function-oriented tasks much more efficiently in the future. User studies are used to further evaluate the novel 3D methods and to identify improvement potentials and areas for future work.

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This research connects two heterogeneous domains of automotive development in order to provide
novel, beneficial methods for function-oriented product lifecycle management.

Novel 3D methodologies for function-oriented visualization and analyses

6DOFWorkspace 6DOFPlayfield
Two examples of function-oriented 3D visualization and localization for analysis tasks.
Left:Headlamp flasher vehicle function elements, Right: Steering column power supply grounding connection.

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Interactive exploration of 3D CAD data and retrieval of function-oriented information.

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Analysis of function distributions within crash-relevant vehicle zones.

Results

Videos

Example #1: Localization of elements of a vehicle headlamp flasher function

Publications