FEV establishes “smart vehicle” global center of excellence

Move centralizes global development of connected and automated vehicles

With its new “smart vehicle” center of excellence, FEV considers the importance of connected and automated vehicles as an integrated part of its daily development work.

Global engineering service provider, FEV, continues to push ahead with its global “smart vehicle” development efforts by establishing a global center of excellence (CoE) focusing on the on interdisciplinary development of connectivity and the automation of future vehicle development.

In addition to the integration of advanced driver assistance systems and automated driving functions (ADAS and AD), this will include infotainment and telematics systems as well as connected vehicle networking -- meaning Car2X and Car2Cloud communication and the closely linked topic of cyber security.

Stephan Tarnutzer, vice president of electronics at FEV North America, Inc. takes on management responsibility for the global CoE and will be responsible for FEV’s worldwide smart vehicle development activities. This organizational change will ensure targeted networking of technical experts from all of FEV’s locations and departments.

“Development tasks for both OEMs and service providers are becoming increasingly complicated as a result of the integration of new functions, interfaces, and components. This requires not only appropriate teams of experts, but also benchmarking databases and powerful tools,” explains Professor Stefan Pischinger, president and CEO of the FEV Group. “With our “smart vehicle” development strategy and the establishment of the new center of excellence, we are responding to these challenges with a multidisciplinary and holistic approach that enables short development times and reliable results.”

Wide Variety of Functions and Providers Requires Connected System Thinking

From a development standpoint, the increasing “connectedness” of vehicles means that countless new functions, suppliers, and development tasks are arising. Under contract to its customers, FEV develops hardware components and control software for connected vehicles. It also tests and validates features and functions for various domain controllers. In this way, technologies from different suppliers and across a variety of industries can be integrated into end-to-end systems and validated in the connected vehicle ecosystem. “In order to control the large number of resulting interactions within, outside and around the vehicle, it is essential to consider the entire system at every stage of development," explains Stephan Tarnutzer, head of FEV’s global "smart vehicle" center of excellence. “Using this “connected system thinking” approach, we are able to very quickly conduct extensive design, integration and validation tasks. Automated development and testing tools play a key role here.”

Powerful Telematics Tools

FEV already exploits the advantages of simulation and modeling for development and testing purposes in customer projects. For example, FEV has developed a telematics system tester (TST) that makes it possible to very quickly apply and evaluate hundreds of different scenarios in a controlled environment.

Cyber Security Becoming More Important

With the increasing incorporation of data-based content in modern vehicles, cyber security is becoming increasingly important. As the number of vehicle interfaces increases, it becomes more vulnerable. FEV provides its customers with comprehensive analysis of risks, threats, and vulnerabilities as well as specific cyber security gateways. The cyber security gateway is connected to the vehicle’s communications bus to detect and prevent malicious attacks. It can also be used as a firewall between external interfaces and the vehicle bus to prevent cyber-attacks.