Fiat Chooses Altia’s Graphics Tools for Automotive Electronic System Design

Fiat uses new tools and methods to design automotive electronic systems. Altia is selected as a key technology to help significantly decrease development times and cost.

In the reorganization of FIAT Automotive, a cross function has been assigned to the engineering process. This has resulted in new system design methods that have had a positive effect on development process, and most importantly, the key issue of project specifications. Fiat has teamed with Teoresi – Altia’s partner and product support team in Italy – to realize these system engineering changes and positive results. An interview with Mr.Edoardo Sivera, Chief Engineer of Fiat, discusses these recent changes.

The relationship between driver and his vehicle has become more and more complex. Technology improved performance, security and comfort, but also sharpened – particularly during last decade, with the massive introduction of electric and electronic systems – a market demand driven by technology, yet influenced by a strong social and cultural component. The car is an object that went through a kind of humanization process or at least an extreme personalization: became a prosthesis of the individual, an extension of his identity, from simple means of transportation to status symbol. In this context, advertising is very significant.

In practical terms, this process was converted in response to a substantial increase of information flow from vehicle to driver, permitting the latter to control a growing number of components and performance. In short, the human-machine relationship was transformed into a complex communication system, where the applied languages are not always simply to be encoded and interpreted.

In FIAT Auto, the goal to integrate different functions of the various electric and electronic systems in modern cars is the charge of the E&SI (Electronic and System Integration) department, which is part of P&PE – A.C.E.E. (Product & Process Engineering – Electric/Electronic Competencies Area).

The interview with Mr.Edoardo Sivera, who works in E&SI, developing and managing software methodologies, starts informally, then rapidly gets to the heart of the matter, concerning the new way FIAT designs electronic systems.

The engineering departments that interact to build a car are many. Can you explain how you are organized?

FIAT Auto is split in Business Units – true miniature companies with a specific mission – both productive and commercial. There are units that care about different brands (FIAT, LANCIA, ALFA ROMEO) over the world market, including all activities to run the services related to the automotive world. Each of these units develops and builds a specific product or service. The organizational model provides for all engineering activities to be conducted outside the Business Units, answering the engineering demand of the various units through an integrated and transversal action. On the one hand, the aim is to standardize the engineering of common elements. On the other hand it is to provide specific solutions for all different vehicles through a single methodology, shared between all areas. The advantages are easy to guess. For example, we care about electric and electronic systems and about their integration with the other systems set up on a vehicle.

So we can say that you’re transversal in respect to all engineering functions.

Exactly. Concerning the electronic systems on board the car, our principal aim – we’re working on this for some years and we still have a long way to go – is to standardize methods and tools, just to create best synergies between the different design areas. We are promoting a single product development methodology, a common product development culture, where all the internal areas and the outside providers have to meet.

In practical terms, how is this methodology structured?

It consists of systematically using simulation models built to validate the functionality of a system before its hardware implementation. Thanks to the use of simulation software, rapid prototyping and graphical interfaces, we gain the possibility to clarify at our best the functional logic of each system, to identify and to clearly illustrate project specifications, to make homogeneous and secure the passage from the project to the final product. We are in a condition to see and make our customers or providers see how each component has to be and to function. In this way, we nearly cancel the risk that, once realized, any prototype or final product comes up with defects, missing conformities or incompatibilities with other systems. This approach is much more significant when you think that the automotive demand, as in other market segments, is always more refined from the point of view of comfort and security, apart from the obvious one of performance.

I guess that this poses a problem to you: how to let your suppliers know the specifications concerning a new component or system to realize?

Indeed, this is the critical issue. It has always been difficult to understand each other. The specific description of a product expressed in a natural and informal language (Italian, English or whatever else) inevitably produces different interpretations. This complicates the relationships and dilates the quantity of time dedicated to components’ production and conformity validation. Moreover, we come from a mechanical culture, which has put minimal emphasis into electronic design. Our method aims to involve suppliers at the planning stage. We make them see the performance requirements of the component, its functionality, the global running of the system, its integration with other systems and the algorithms that rule it.

And what about time? The adoption of new methodologies and new technologies reduces it, doesn’t it?

Yes, it does. The market always requires more new cars and with ever more sophisticated content. This requires very rapid development times, to supply updated products, close to market expectations. The introduction of new methodologies and new technologies aims to increase the quality of the final product, but most notably a reduction in development time. In this context, simulation, rapid prototyping, graphical interfaces and automatic code generators permit a huge saving of time, but only when their adoption becomes a normal routine. This is what we’re trying to do, without hiding from ourselves the complexity of the whole operation: it’s not only a matter of introducing new technologies and persuading people to use them, but it’s a matter of mind-set change, managing the process from design to product in a completely different way. The whole implementation falls on us, adjusting the entire system to this new logic. A fascinating challenge.

Choosing new technologies, which is the general criterion that you followed?

The fundamental problem for people who have to design an object or a system is to know as soon as possible if it functions or not. The true time and costs saving depends on the possibility to work out problems ahead, “seeing” them before they manifest themselves. New simulation and rapid prototyping technologies permit to validate single functions and the whole system before it is made out. As with ALTIA, we also have the great advantage to clearly observe how it actually behaves. This means a very significant decrease in terms of time and costs.

Naming ALTIA, we get to the heart of the matter in which TEORESI directly contributes to your design activities. How is this technological partnership configured?

It’s a kind of involvement that goes beyond software supplying and traditional consulting. The new way to design that we’re trying to introduce is not configured in an instrumental sense anymore, as it has happened up until recently, when external providers were simply new tools bearers or they personally were called out to be an additional tool in the process. Today we need knowledge, consolidated experience in avant-garde design, resource and design requirements sharing, competence applied to engineering processes for production. This is what we get from Teoresi. Our technical cooperation expands through the education and training area, to create professional profiles able to manage new technologies; this collaboration becomes strategic in software development, to create tools fitted up for specific design processes. Teoresi ensures useful updates on technological evolution, permitting us not to spread what is already acquired: innovation is inserted on experience and this means having a chance of growth with no discontinuities. This is important: a company cannot throw away its know-how, but needs to enhance it. In this sense, exchange with people on market is a strategic issue. The results are extremely positive with a partner like Teoresi, who is clearly willing, professional, rapid in understanding our needs and able to create a climate of mutual trust. These are kinds of relationships that become organic, in the sense that are typical of the new way of working and designing. FIAT has gone through some difficult times. The fact that we put more resources into new methodologies and new technologies is a convincing sign of will to get out from the crisis. We continue to build cars and to sell them, but we’re trying to innovate engineering processes, using new tools and new methods. We have tools: the main issue is to adapt their employment, passing from idea to final product through economically viable projects.

We did not forget the final user. We spoke to him with attention and sympathy, well conscious of the innovative effort to exempt him from side effects, yet providing tangible advantages for comfort and security -- and for quality of life too, because he deserves it.