Analysis and Modeling of Future Electric/Electronic Architectures for Modular Vehicles Concepts

In addition to the megatrends electrification, automation and connectivity, the whole mobility business model is experiencing substantial transformation through increasing car sharing services, less individual traffic and introducing new environmental protection measures. This leads to new modular vehicle concepts. These new modular and reconfigurable vehicle concepts should also consider the new trends such as automated/autonomous driving, connected vehicles and OTA updates. In addition, high security and safety requirements must be fulfilled. All this leads to an increasing complexity of the Electric/Electronic architecture (E/E-A) for modular vehicles. The adaptation of the existing approaches in the E/E-A design to those becomes challenging especially regarding the aspect of distributed and integrated E/E modules in different vehicle parts. We analyzed existing concepts for E/E-A design targeting the mentioned new trends and showed their limits for application in modular vehicle concepts. Based on that, we conducted a gap analysis to cover the needs for the considered aspects and integrated the results in a generic E/E-A model consisting of drive module, additional vehicle parts and cloud/infrastructure module. The resulting architecture is based on modular distributed services leading to a seamless service-oriented architecture which is able to handle the new challenges.