interview ›› MAKING MODEL-BASED DEVELOPMENT AGILE, EFFICIENT AND USER-FRIENDLY ‹‹ Bernhard Schick, Global Business Unit Manager of the newly created Calibration & Virtual Testing Solutions BU, elaborates on what drives him forward, his goals and ways in which customers 2 4 F O C U S benefit from integrating new methods and tools into their process and tool landscapes. ‹F›: What was the reason for establishing the new Calibration & Virtual Testing Solutions Business Unit at AVL? ‹Bernhard Schick›: Our customers are facing the major challenge of having to develop and secure a growing number of variants with increasing complexity within shorter and shorter periods of time. At its core, the issue is all about achieving increased agility, efficiency and robustness in the development process, so that these tough tasks can be dealt with. Crucial to addressing this challenge are consistent, model-based testing methods and tools, to which the processes, development environments and collaboration models need to be adapted. So, to be able to optimally support our customers during their transformation process, we decided to realign our organization structure: The Calibration, Test Information Management and Virtual Testing segments bring together all the in-process methods and tools that are used throughout the development and may even go well beyond the powertrain. We intend to complement these segments with consulting and application services, in which we not only offer the products but also provide handson support in process optimization activities for specific applications (emissions, consumption, drivability, driver assistance systems, etc.). The scope covers everything from analysis, concept and feasibility studies to best-practice implementation. The important thing here is to ensure that our customers’ existing methods and tools for simulation and testing are individually integrated. ‹F›: Could you give us an example of how you help your customers? ‹Schick›: Let’s say we have the automated calibration of an automatic transmission on a transmission test bed in view of consumption, drive performance and drivability. This transmission has to be complemented by a complete vehicle and an environment model in an X-in-theloop framework. So to optimize and save the characteristics of an entire vehicle it is necessary to include the engine, the powertrain, the vehicle, the road, the driver and the environment. For this purpose, processes need to be defined and implemented at our customers’ locations, which will then establish how the required tools, models, parameters, control units, driving maneuvers, routes and so forth from the different departments are to be determined, delivered to the test bed, integrated
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