Classification of Automotive Electric/Electronic Features and the Consequent Hierarchization of the Logical System Architecture

In the established Automotive Systems Engineering (ASE) practice, an important factor in handling the complexity of product development is the partitioning of the vehicle into different domains. The current technological advances enable increasingly complex features for assisted and automated driving that reach across these different domains and are difficult to handle by the existing approaches. To cope with these challenges, new innovative methods, procedures and techniques are required that integrate well with the established practice. In this contribution, we analyze existing and future automotive features and classify them in a comprehensive taxonomy. Based on this characterization, established industrial and new research approaches for logical system architectures are consolidated. The introduction of new levels of hierarchy in the logical system architecture facilitates the attribution of specific design schemes and engineering approaches to the related functional elements. This approach facilitates the management of features with high internal variety and wide distribution over several subsystems. The systematic approach provides a novel rationale for the evolution from functional chains to functional networks in the automotive industry.