The Future of Automotive Engineering and Assessments – Will the Curse of Complexity Hit Assessors KO?

Ten years ago, assessments had a clear focus on one ECU, software on the ECU, and a mechatronic system controlled by the SW. Nowadays, assessments evaluate systems of systems where in one system, a cluster of ECUs, different software teams and synchronised vehicle functions are in the focus. In some cases, the integrated functions run on a server (Linux) connected to the cloud as well. To add to the complexity, the SW per ECU comes from many platform teams which themselves are constitute an assessment project scope. Using the VDA approach of instances, this can lead to 5–7 instances and weeks of assessment in the near future. Moreover, this complex scenario does not even consider that assessors of such projects need to have the technical skills required to still understand the connections between parts and projects, and to be able to rate at both high and low levels of the architecture since the teams which need to be assessed are very different from each other, and work on various scopes and architecture layers. This paper discusses such rapidly emerging forms of complexity that assessments are increasingly confronted with, and it outlines some best practices and future concepts to handle them.