LEAN Techniques for Effective, Efficient and Secure Information Processing in Automotive Homologation

It is an established fact that virtual knowledge based engineering has revolutionized R & D activities by streamlining processes, ensuring productivity and accuracy. This has resulted in freeing up time for quality interpretational work and decision making for engineering the best of products. Subsequently, homologation is a mandatory requisite activity for product signoff. It certifies the quality of the product and is an important factor in giving the product an authenticity for sale in the market. Homologation entails compliance to regulations existing in form of well-established standards which elaborate systematic and detailed guidelines on conducting physical testing for automotive systems, sub-systems or components for specific vehicle types. The contemporary homologation scenario encompasses heavy usage of virtual platform tasks like data acquisition, application of heuristics from the standards, post processing, classification, test output report and type approval certificate generation. It is highly desirable that the homologation procedure needs to be streamlined and of high fidelity through seamless integration of all steps involved in the information processing as well as effective capture of homologation knowledge in a virtual form. This can be achieved by LEAN knowledge based techniques. The author hereby elucidates such a LEAN knowledge based framework that captures the heuristics outlined in the homologation standards in a form comprising of a structured taxonomy to address each of the compliance requirements, and seamlessly integrates them with all the upstream and downstream information processing tasks involved in the certification. Two sample tools are showcased for expounding the efficacy of this framework. These tools are integrated into the daily test procedures followed by the testing personnel, ensuring phenomenal productivity and accuracy. In addition, these tools leverage frugal automation platforms available right on the desktop, rendering them highly cost effective. Thus both tacit and explicit regulatory and process knowledge is captured and secured effectively which also conforms to requirements of system standards such as IS0 9001 and IS0 27001.