Example: An Engine Design Team
An engine product line is used in a wide array of customer applications. Some are marine, others are agricultural, and others are in earth-moving applications.
There is a strategic product goal to shift to hybrid power sources that combine ICE and electric motors.
A supporting strategic product goal is to reduce downtime for over-the-air software updates to zero. Another goal is to enable customers to do their own repairs, which is challenging with respect to the ability to perform over-the-air software updates on configurations that are being modified by users.
There is an architectural vision for how to achieve these things. Many of the details are still being worked out.
Six teams maintain the ECUs for an engine product line. Each ECU has a CPU and some ECUs have one or more ASICs. In addition, each ECU has a communication chip to connect it to the communication bus. Most of the team members are electrical engineers. These are the teams we are focusing on here.
They use LabView to design the software that runs on the ECU CPUs.
They use LabView to design the real time algorithms that are implemented on the ASICs.
There are eight teams of mechanical engineers who design and test the engine mechanical systems.
There is a separate pair of electrical engineering teams that support the communication bus that is used.
There is a set of four teams that maintain the operating systems that run on the CPUs in the ECUs. The operating system and a suite of communication utilities are all written in C.
They have desktop test benches for flashing chips and running component tests, simulating external inputs using pre-coded signal files.
They have “environment” simulation models that simulate an entire engine’s operation, with respect to the inputs to the various ECUs and the communication bus between the many ECUs.
There is a lab where several ECUs can be run together, connected by a real communication bus, with an environment simulation generating events.
Results from field tests are relayed daily, with anomalies flagged for analysis.