Balancing Value Trade-Offs in Automotive Platform Evolution

Doctoral thesis, 2024

In a rapidly evolving automotive landscape, with quick technological advancements and shifting customer demands, the ability to design flexible product platforms has become a critical competitive advantage. This thesis aims to develop design supports for the iterative design and analysis of the incorporation of new technology into automotive product platforms, by investigating how these platforms can adapt to rapid technological changes and diverse customer demands, i.e., expand their external variety. The intense competitive landscape and minimal profit margins in the automotive industry have necessitated its platform development to focus on cost efficiency and standardization, i.e., limiting the internal variety. However, with the increasing pressures of sustainability and the need for quicker market responses, traditional approaches have shown that the rigidity of the constraints they impose limits their ability to adapt swiftly.

This thesis proposes a model-based framework that emphasizes the early integration of flexibility, value-based decision-making, resilient design strategies, and proactive risk management to address these challenges. A new method using the concept of platform margins was introduced to assess platform flexibility over time. Further, the concept of resilient objects was developed, which are platform components that can easily adapt to or absorb changes. The research also addressed change propagation, especially considering Field Effects (FE). These methods were validated through real-world tests involving experienced practitioners from Swedish automotive OEMs.

This thesis highlights the importance of prioritizing flexibility from the initial stages of platform design when the impact of architectural decisions is greater. By employing value-based decision-making techniques, the framework balances short-term and long-term goals, aligning the control of current costs with the necessary buffers to address future needs. Proactive risk management techniques are employed to predict and mitigate potential risks from the higher-order effects of technology changes. This framework, with its focus on platform design margins, provides a strategic approach to optimizing the trade-off between both internal and external variety, ensuring platforms are not only efficient today but also ready for the innovations of tomorrow.