Robust design of E/E architecture component platforms

Already today, car manufacturers are designing E/E architectures using so-called component platforms. Such a platform comprises the superset of all components that are required to build all acquirable variants of a certain or even multiple car models. To find and optimize such component platforms, each candidate platform has to be evaluated by (a) determining a number of design objectives (monetary cost, etc.) of each car variant when derived from the candidate platform and then (b) approximating the platform´s design objectives themselves, e. g., by a weighted sum that includes the expected sales of each variant. But typically, since this optimization has to take place in early design stages, important parameters like the number of expected sales numbers per car variant can only be projected and are, thus, uncertain. To investigate the susceptibility of the optimization to such uncertain parameters, this paper proposes a Monte-Carlo simulation-based method that enables to evaluate the uncertainty of a combined multi-variant objective wrt. parameter variations. By treating the minimization of uncertainty as an additional design objective, not only can the robustness of the derived component platforms be improved but also the confidence of the manufacturer. Moreover, we also propose to treat uncertainty not as a conventional design objective, but to use uncertain objectives: Here, not a single (e. g., mean) value but an interval given by observed upper and lower objective values is used. Experimental results show that the design objectives of an E/E architecture component platform are relatively robust wrt. parameter variations (here expected sales numbers of car variants). Moreover, it will be shown that the difference in expected overall costs between different non-dominated solutions is often much higher than the expected variation in cost as a result of parameter uncertainty.