This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Conference "Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 16-18 March 2021.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. The demand to manufacture cleaner, safer, and smarter vehicles, along with providing an overall enhanced driving and ride experience, has never been higher. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce reliable, effective results.

Hence, the challenges for automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods, and processes such that they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these innovative technologies to market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

Next generation vehicles will be connected and autonomous – and more likely to be electric rather that depend on hydrocarbons. Until the vehicles transform into a fully connected Level 5 automation, we will depend on ADAS. ADAs depend on having fused sensory systems that has purpose built detection algorithms that have to function in real time. In addition, these systems have to distract the driver and work in multitude of weather and lighting conditions. In order to depend upon these sensors, we need to provide some form of guarantees for each of the operations domains (that may be partitioned based on lighting, precipitation, sand, temperate, weather, noise, electromagnetics, radio noise and road geometry.

Given that all sensors are cyber-physical systems that are based on some physical phenomenon, and use detection and or controller activity built into them, they may have failure modes and cyber activity can alter their accuracy that will lead to unacceptable performance degradations. The entire workflow between the sensing and display can be affected by cyber activity. Having a common vulnerability and weakness and a standard set of scenarios with an acceptable set of performance would provide a great help in simulations.