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The rapid growth of vehicle feature content continues to challenge automotive designers. The total vehicle feature content seriously impacts the manufacturing complexity of any single vehicle. Traditional strategies for introducing new features into high-content luxury vehicles before moving the feature into economy vehicles have been undermined by the fast moving consumer electronics field. The challenge for automotive OEM and Tier 1 suppliers is to optimize the vehicle architecture in order to provide more efficient means of introducing features expediently and efficiently. Therefore, any production vehicle's Electrical, Electronic, & Software (EES) architecture must successfully support modular sourcing, modular assembly, global manufacturing schemes, cost and weight issues.

Consumers always seem to want more features, better reliability, and increased value. Regulations seem to grow ever more detailed and competitors are constantly raising the stakes by implementing new innovations. This coupled with the fact that automotive manufacturers are constantly trying to reduce cost and weight of the vehicle, makes the task of designing a vehicle even more challenging. One of the major contributors to the vehicles cost and weight is the electrical/electronics system. Designing a vehicle's electrical/electronic system is a complex task with many constraints (e.g., cost, timing, manufacturing, assembly, weight, quality, reliability, serviceability, industry standards, brand image, etc). Analyzing and understanding all of these constraints and alternatives is how the vehicle's electrical/electronic system should be designed. In this paper, the constraints that need to be considered when designing a vehicle's electrical/electronic system will be discussed.