Insights into Transitioning towards Electrics/Electronics Platform Management in the Automotive Industry

In the automotive industry, platform strategies have proved effective for streamlining the development of complex, highly variable cyber-physical systems. Particularly software-driven innovations are becoming the primary source of new features in automotive systems, such as lane-keeping assistants, traffic-sign recognition, or even autonomous driving. To address the growing importance of software, automotive companies are progressively adopting concepts of software-platform engineering, such as software product lines. However, even when adapting such concepts, a noticeable gap exists regarding the holistic management of all aspects within a cyber-physical system, including hardware, software, electronics, variability, and interactions between all of these. Within the automotive industry, electrics/electronics platforms are an emerging trend to achieve this holistic management. In this paper, we report insights into the transition towards electrics/electronics platform management in the automotive industry, eliciting current challenges, their respective key success factors, and strategies for resolving them. For this purpose, we performed 24 semi-structured interviews with practitioners within the automotive industry. Our insights contribute strategies for other companies working on adopting electrics/electronics platform management (e.g., centralizing platform responsibilities), while also highlighting possible directions for future research (e.g., improving over-the-air updates).