Research is the source of our inspiration

V&V Methods (VVM) is a consortium project for the validation and verification of highly automated driving functions led by Robert Bosch GmbH and BMW AG and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection. The objective of this project is to develop test procedures and methods that can be used to provide proof of safety for highly automated vehicles in the development process. VVM is part of the VDA's flagship initiative on autonomous driving, which also includes its sister project SET Level.

In the project, PROSTEP has assumed responsibility for the task of providing the project partners with support in the context of defining requirements and transferring the project results to industrial applications. At the Mid-Term event held in March 2022, we presented the concept of a capability-based architecture for automated vehicles in urban environments and introduced the demonstrator for our traceability solution. The solution makes it easier to trace the development and simulation of safety-critical systems by linking the relevant information across systems and provides support for the validation process. Once the project has been completed, the solution will be available on the market as a module in our OpenCLM solution.

ICT-Enabled Model-Based Impact Analysis in Product Development, or ImPaKT for short, is a consortium project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research and headed up by the Heinz Nixdorf Institute at the University of Paderborn. The objective of the project is to develop a model-based and AI-supported approach that will allow the technical and financial impact of changes on complex, mechatronic products with numerous variants to be assessed more reliably. The prerequisite for this is the creation of an interdisciplinary development process using tools and methods employed in model-based systems engineering.

In addition to PROSTEP, several software companies, research institutes and industrial companies are involved in the project. As a first step, the project partners have defined a reference architecture for end-to-end model-based system development under the leadership of PROSTEP. Building on this architecture, we have developed certain basic services for performing cross-system impact analyses using artificial intelligence (AI) and have implemented them in our OpenCLM software. The software maps the relationships between requirements, functions and elements in the product structure and supports the introduction of systems engineering in companies by means of a Cameo integration, among other things.

ProProS was a joint project funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection and headed up by the Lürssen shipyard group that was successfully completed in May 2023. As part of the project, the project partners developed a new methodology that makes it possible for shipyards to plan their production processes well in advance, control these processes efficiently and respond to disruptions. This is intended to significantly reduce the lead time for outfitting and building ships.

Within the framework of the research project, PROSTEP mapped the methodology in a software demonstrator that is capable of processing up-to-the-minute, real-time data from production. This makes it possible to identify disruptions at an early stage in production planning and make appropriate changes to the planning. The solution enables highly efficient control of the production of complex individual products without driving up the level of manual effort required for production planning.

In addition to V&V Methods, SET Level was another consortium project on the validation and verification of highly automated driving functions funded by the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Protection in which PROSTEP was involved. Within the framework of the project, which was brought to a close at the end of 2022, the project partners defined, among other things, a credible simulation process (CSP) and an integrative simulation architecture that enables distributed simulation.

PROSTEP not only provided the project partners with support in the context of defining the requirements but also in the context of transferring the project results to industrial applications. We therefore developed the demonstrator for a traceability solution that maps the CSP in terms of IT, monitors its execution and documents the evaluation of the simulation results. TRACY has become a key component for ensuring the end-to-end digitalization and traceability of simulation-based development processes in our traceability solution OpenCLM.