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Reductions of hardware costs as well as implementations of new innovative functions are the main drivers of today's automotive electronics. Indeed more and more resources are spent on adapting existing solutions to different environments. At the same time, due to the increasing number of networked components, a level of complexity has been reached which is difficult to handle using traditional development processes. The automotive industry addresses this problem through a paradigm shift from a hardware-, component-driven to a requirement- and function-driven development process, and a stringent standardization of infrastructure elements. One central standardization initiative is the AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture (AUTOSAR). AUTOSAR was founded in 2003 by major OEMs and Tier1 suppliers and now includes a large number of automotive, electronics, semiconductor, hard- and software companies.

The current automotive electric/electronic (E/E) architecture landscape is characterized by proprietary solutions, which seldom allow the exchange of applications between both automotive OEMs and their suppliers. It is apparent that on the basis of a continued exponential growth in functional scope, further proliferation of proprietary solutions will consume more and more resources and may become difficult to control. AUTOSAR is a joint initiative of several major industry players and aims to prepare for the increase in functional scope. This paper presents an overview over the development partnership as well as the technical concept and methodology. It concludes that introduction of an industry-wide standard of automotive E/E architecture is indeed vitally important and it is that, which will allow the industry players to concentrate on innovation rather than wasting effort when adapting existing components to different environments.

A new approach in numerical occupant simulation using the dynamic coupling of the nonlinear explicit finite element code PAM-CRASH and the crash victim simulation program MADYMO has been validated and is presented. The new technique combines the advantages of the finite element method for the solution of dynamic problems with large structural deformations with the merits of validated occupant models. It uses the full capabilities of both industrial programs PAM-CRASH and MADYMO, and is therefore well suited for an industrial environment. A description of the coupling method will be given in this paper. The study to be presented investigates the interaction of a Hybrid III dummy and a passive restraint system consisting of an airbag and a kneebolster in a frontal impact situation. Both, the airbag and the kneebolster are discretized using finite elements; the dummy model consists of 20 rigid bodies with attached contact ellipsoids.

Numerical calculations with high predictability for the analysis of deformation and nonlinear energy management of car structures during frontal impact are an essential tool when decisisons are needed regarding the structural design of car bodies in white during the early stages of car development without the existence of prototypes. Graphics-aided preprocessing allows the modelling of three-dimensional car structures with about 10,000 finite elements. The numerical calculations are based on the physics of crash metal-forming. The entire analysis is divided into about 40,000 simulated time steps. Supercomputers have to be used so as to enable a single crash simulation to be run overnight, whereas scalar computers would need many days. The results of crash simulation are postprocessed by way of coloured computer graphics which make it possible to assess the deformation of the car structure and to take special engineering results into account.