Getting information about new products and/ or services across the design and manufacturing/ quality assurance community of automotive engineers is one of the greatest challenges of mankind. Since information is the key to progress, an organization's success often depends on its ability to communicate.
National and international competition forces designers and manufacturers to continuously innovate and make their product design and manufacturing / assembly processes lean and market driven. Simultaneously the time to market is rapidly shrinking. This means that marketing and sales departments have to explain and sell their increasingly more complex products to an increasingly more educated and globally distributed customer base at a competitive price, and in a short time.
In order to support automotive designers and manufacturers in their efforts to collaborate with globally distributed suppliers and collaborating designers and manufacturers, to demonstrate and support their products, as well as to communicate customer feedback to their design department,we have
researched and then developed a generic digital factory, and
digital car model, and a
methodology by focusing on key processes, objects and their interactions, and
created a software tool-set that will systematically assist and support engineers and managers to analyze requirements and processes along value flows, process-related risks, and develop virtual product demonstrations, and support advanced telematics applications as part of the on-board and off-line Driver Information Systems (DIS), following a quantitative and computational approach.
To summarize, the challenge we address in this paper is that we model the digital automotive factory, as well as the digital car as an integrated system, that is designed, manufactured, maintained, monitored, controlled, and supported throughout its multiple lifecycles in a web-collaborative fashion, using analytical, quantitative and computational methods. (Ranky, 1997, 2002).