Authoring and verifying vehicle configuration rules

Paper in proceeding, 2011

Vehicles require large set of configuration rules defining which vehicles that are allowed to be built. Incorrect rules may have expensive consequences, e.g. faulty configurations with missing parts in production. This paper aims to investigate industrially applied methods for authoring and verifying confi¬guration rules, specifically to understand the difficulties that potentially may lead to faulty configurations. The research method was mainly by interviewing design engineers and product structure specialists at three large automotive companies operating in-house developed Product Data Management systems for the product structure. Both roles want configuration rules that are easy to read based on their specific needs. However, their needs differ due to different daily working activities. Our main contribution is to formally define the authoring methods that we have found during the interviews, and to analyze their strengths and weaknesses during the verification activity.