Perhaps no consumer product is more complex than today’s automobile. The combination of mechanical and electrical systems that have over 100 million lines of software code has essentially created a mobile, passenger-carrying computer. Such a complex system depends on the quality and reliability of every component, and on how these components are designed to interact with each other.

To respond to rising product complexity, the automotive industry has created robust safety and process standards. But your engineering organization may find these standards onerous if they’re not well supported by their engineering tools. One of these standards — ASPICE (Automotive Software Process Improvement and Capability dEtermination) — is concerned with the quality of the development process.

Automotive manufacturers and suppliers throughout the world strive to increase levels of ASPICE compliance. Doing so enables them to achieve and prove that their development processes meet state-of-the art engineering practices. To help clients achieve higher ASPICE levels more quickly, IBM has teamed up with ASPICE industry expert Kugler Maag Cie to develop an integrated approach to support ASPICE compliance. The solution also greatly reduces the burden and overhead typically associated with ASPICE assessments.

Insightful engineering at enterprise scale

The IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management portfolio provides tools to manage the end-to-end engineering lifecycle in a coordinated and scalable way. It automates both traditional waterfall and agile methodologies to streamline and simplify highly complex activities. These include requirements management, systems design, testing and impact analysis. Real-time collaboration capabilities and full traceability across all your engineering artifacts help to break down organizational siloes that otherwise would inhibit quality and efficiency.

ASPICE compliance is no longer an afterthought

A new addition to IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management (ELM) was released on December 13, 2019. The IBM Engineering Lifecycle Management Automotive Compliance solution introduces pre-defined assets for compliance and ASPICE. The comprehensive automotive systems and software engineering solution includes project dashboards, agile process guidance and detailed reports. It helps remove the burden from engineering compliance teams to integrate ASPICE compliance within regular engineering work.

Starting with stakeholder requirements and moving through systems architecture, software design, and verification and validation, the IBM ELM Automotive Compliance solution offers a tremendous advantage for ASPICE assessments. Your teams – wherever they are – can perform their engineering tasks confident in the knowledge that they are following ASPICE compliant processes.

IBM ELM Automotive Compliance improves the entire automotive OEM and supplier ecosystem

For more than ten years, ASPICE compliance has been a crucial factor for automotive suppliers to win business. In 2015, the standard evolved and explicitly separated engineering process groups into system and software engineering processes. ASPICE thereby paved the way for compatible assessment process frameworks for mechanical and electrical processes as well. Today, automotive OEMs worldwide recognize the value of ASPICE to manage internal process quality and to assess suppliers. IBM’s ELM Automotive Compliance solution supports the entire OEM and supplier ecosystem by improving their engineering processes.

As clients mature in their use of this solution, they will leverage it to standardize development processes beyond just the project level and transform entire organizations. Reuse of project artifacts and processes becomes a reality. Strengths and weaknesses of development organizations are identified, and overall flexibility can be improved. That’s quite a feat. And some of the most innovative and successful OEMs and suppliers are already well down this path.

Learn more

As the automotive industry faces increasingly stringent compliance regulations, IBM’s total ELM solution goes beyond basic compliance. We combine IoT, AI, and analytics to provide an end-to-end, integrated development process with compliance guidance built right in. Next, we are looking at creating similar solutions with sophisticated and detailed guidance on topics like Functional Safety (ISO26262), Cyber Security (SAE/ISO21434) and Safety of The Intended Functionality (SOTIF).

Read the joint paper from Kugler Maag Cie and IBM