Making VIRTUAL VEHICLE DESIGN a reality

A new virtual design approach for commercial vehicle concepts allows for purposeful design and integration of new concepts and technologies on the component level in an existing product portfolio, while not neglecting the need for standardization and modularity.

With products more and more diverse and growing vehicle portfolios on the market, variant management has become of enormous significance in coping with challenging cost and quality requirements. Modular systems and related methodologies are a common approach in many companies and currently are widely discussed in research. But the research on modularity and its management has not yet reached application-oriented maturity, and implementation in industry is rather fragmentary for different companies, industries, and products.

Commercial vehicles are high-variant products with comparatively small production volumes; therefore, a concept development phase focusing on variance becomes a major aspect in planning and determining standards, modularity, and commonality within the future product portfolio. Due to long product life cycles (typically 20 to 30 years), the basic architectures of commercial vehicles continuously undergo a small evolution and many technical changes and innovations have to be held available-in many cases triggered by changes in legislation. Therefore, both the careful planning of design interfaces and their management are important for successful use of modularity and commonality within the product ranage.