Vehicle Design Processes, 3rd Edition

Dear Colleagues,

Design processes for vehicles are a promising research topic since vehicle design remains one of the most challenging tasks in engineering. This is due in part to the enormous consumer expectations and the intensive global competition, which combine to ensure that cost-driven design is a necessity and that vehicles need to be economical in terms of their production, operation, and recycling. Indeed, sustainable design is also imperative for ecological vehicles. All aspects of vehicle dynamics have to be considered in the design of every component and light-weight design is of fundamental importance. Moreover, consumers expect convincing functional performance, high product quality, engaging appearance, consistent reliability, and interconnected functionality as well as comprehensible and appealing user interfaces. Increasingly, additional services are being packaged with vehicles. These enormous requirements lead to complex and multi-domain design processes, because most of the important decisions are made in the design phase. Production optimization and intelligent operation are important topics, but flaws and insufficiencies in the design stage can lead to enormous expenditures in later stages and less-than-perfect products. Design processes for vehicles involve thousands of engineers spread globally and need to consider multiple product versions and variants as well as multi-company product platforms. Very often, testing necessities and legal issues play an important role in these processes and the economic and ecological quality of the product has to be monitored throughout the process. Even in the early stages, vehicle safety and ergonomic quality need to be considered. Needless to say, only digital support makes these processes feasible—for all domains, powerful computer tools for synthesis, analysis, evaluation, and optimization have been created and numerous attempts have been undertaken to try to sensibly link the data used by all of these tools. However, many domain-specific and generic data formats, as well as the sheer size of the datasets, continue create serious problems. It is important to note that design is also connected with scheduling and project management, because certain design decisions can lead to long-term testing and production preparation processes. The listed challenges concerning the multi-domain processes of vehicle design have led to a salient need for research activities that support designers in these endeavors. This Special Issue intends to present the current state of the art of these research activities including application-oriented attempts to improve certain design tools, attempts to fully integrate digital processes, and novel approaches such as big data and artificial intelligence. We are looking forward to your excellent research papers.

Prof. Dr. Ralf Stetter
Prof. Dr. Udo Pulm
Prof. Dr. Markus Till
Guest Editors

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• design processes
• vehicle design
• design engineering
• digital design
• robotics
• product data management
• multi-domain design processes
• vehicle dynamics
• vehicle safety
• vehicle ergonomics

• Vehicle Design Processes, 2nd Edition in Vehicles (13 articles)