A model-based approach to innovation management of automotive control systems

Innovation management of automotive control systems is a challenging issue not least because of the need to handle short iterative life cycles and families of these systems. After collecting experience in control engineering from a three year collaboration in the automotive domain, we conclude that innovation management is only weakly aligned with feature and platform development. This situation makes it difficult to assure feasibility of innovations and to identify potentials for innovations. We present a novel approach to integrating innovation management with requirements and technology management by using behavioral system models. We investigate requirements-based and technology-based innovation. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first approach to using such models for managing feature and platform innovations in an automotive company. We discuss an example to illustrate how our approach can be applied.