By introducing a decentralized marketplace for engineering artifacts, the students help Bosch to overcome the current limitations in data acquisition and model access, thereby enhancing the quality and efficiency of the verification and validation (V&V) stage in automotive engineering - where hardware and software are tested in simulation.
As an automotive supplier, Bosch struggles with certain aspects of the engineering lifecycle, e.g. to acquire field data of its products to inform the engineering of future revisions or entirely new product categories altogether.
Since a few years, the engineering lifecycle is increasingly happening in a digital fashion, i.e. by testing software and hardware designs in simulation environments and similar approaches. These activities can be understood as a contribution to an engineering domain frequently referred to as “verification and validation” (V&V), which is a crucial stage before industrialization of any new product can commence.
To perform such a V&V stage properly, a company usually requires domain specific knowledge on its product, which should be combined with data from a plethora of sources so to inform the simulation environments at hand. These data sources aren’t accessible to suppliers such as Bosch at all times, though. Hence, there is a desire to have access to 3rd party data and models, for example to test vehicle software modules against such data or models.