Challenges and Architectural Approaches for Automotive PLM in Multi-Brand Organisations - A Discussion Paper

Abstract

Today, top-down processes, centralized IT infrastructures, and one-vendor strategies prevail in Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) of large multi-brand Original Equipment Manufacturer (OEM) groups. Given the usually decentralized organisation and structures and processes that emerge from cross-brand collaboration, these centralized approaches are challenging the adaptiveness and performance of the OEM groups.In this concept paper, we investigate challenges for cross-brand and cross-domain cooperation from the perspective of processes and IT systems. The main contribution of this paper is that we motivate and outline a novel technical architecture approach combining service-orientation with an event-driven software architecture and asynchronous event processing to support users from different brands and domains in their collaboration along the development process. We analyse related work on collaboration models as well as on event processing and discuss our approach before the background of the state of the art. Finally, we summarize our findings and give an outlook to future research venues.