The global automotive landscape is undergoing a significant paradigm shift driven by the rapid development cycles of emerging competitors, leaving traditional European OEMs with a critical time-to-market gap. To bridge this gap, automotive engineering must pivot from traditional hardware-based processes toward agile, digital data-driven methodologies.
This paper presents a feasibility study on the implementation of data-centric approaches in component development, evaluated using the high-voltage wiring harness (HVWH) as a representative example. The HVWH serves as a practical validation case for the presented methodologies, covering both Artificial Intelligence (AI) based and deterministic methods.
The study provides a detailed assessment of various AI-based and deterministic methodologies at specific stages of the product development process, targeting both product design and the product development process itself. The objective is to reduce time-to-market at the component-level by optimizing workflows, increasing process and development efficiency, and enabling knowledge reuse throughout the development process.
Beyond individual method evaluation, the study examines how deterministic and AI-based approaches can be integrated into development workflows. For this purpose, process mining is first applied to identify general challenges specific to the HVWH development workflow and to derive use cases in which AI can contribute to reducing development time. From these, three use cases are selected for detailed investigation. For each use case, the necessary prerequisites, the applied methodology, the results and the limitations of AI integration are described and discussed.
By integrating structured knowledge with automated workflows, the proposed frameworks allow for autonomous application of historical insights to current design parameters, streamlining the decision-making process. This semantic structure prevents the loss of critical engineering knowledge and enables continuous AI-assisted improvement across different vehicle generations.
The study concludes that the proposed use cases provide a technically viable pathway to shorten development timelines, enabling European OEMs to match the speed of competitors while maintaining high standards of quality, functionality and safety.