Research of Automotive Change Management and Combined Risk-management Models

An Electronic-Control-Unit embedded within a car environment is constantly under attack of a continuous flow of modifications of specifications throughout the development life cycle until and beyond Start-of-Production. Root cause for modifications are for instance simply software or hardware errors, improvement for robust design or requirement changes to satisfy the forth-coming demands of the market to ensure later commercial success. Thus the pursuit for best in class products and self-preservation drives the need for modifications and effective methods to review all the side effects of changes before delivery. This paper focuses on the issue to tailor an automotive specific mechanism to guide the requirement change through all the stages determined by a typical automotive development until the settled feature meets the customer. The ability to control the requirement modification involves effective and reproducible procedures to deliver the so-called Request-for-Change (RfC, i.e. [1]) as specified. The Change-Management (CM) process should support all stakeholders with information such as the RfC transition status (i.e. reject, planned, implemented) and impact reports to the initial agreed objectives fixed by contract, which are product features, budget, schedule and quality. The research will not be limited, but focus the investigation of impacts of RfC during the early phase of the project, which are the Concept-Validation and Debugging-Phase. The second part of this paper will undertake the construction of risk management models, utilizing the RfC documentations and impact analysis information produced by the CM process. The research will lead to the understanding of the impact caused by a single RfC, and eventually summarizing the total risk faced by the project at any desired instance within the product life cycle. Finally the research will suggest a visualization model, which cultivates the data of continuous flow of requirement changes into early-warning system and fever curve of the project or a particular project milestone.