Historically, most contributions at events of the vehicle lighting community have focused on development and evaluation of lighting hardware and components. More recently, the buzzword digitalisation has appeared more and more. This new direction is strongly related to software control of systems.
Even so, take a look at the docket for this year’s ISAL next month; most of the presentations and panel discussions are on hardware-related topics. But I would like to refer to Daimler CEO Dieter Zetsche with his statement: “The speed of digitalisation will further increase rapidly. All big trends of the automotive industry are already driven by digitalisation and in return will drive digitalisation.”
So in the lighting community we should be more focused on embracing this trend. It will mean that especially the capacity and competencies must be improved for engineering of software-controlled systems in combination with the relevant hardware.
Software engineering in line with automotive safety requirements brings special challenges, including:
- Reliability, embedding, and release of initial codes and updates. Here the community can learn from the aviation industry.
- Resistance against criminal external hacking attemps—the banking industry can serve as a benchmark in this area.
- The topic of centralised versus decentralised control architectures for the lighting functions and/or a symbiosis of both.
It would be great if, at the next events of our vehicle lighting community, some presentations on this area of software engineering and system architecture could open up the thinking process. The DVN team wants to engage more in this field. As a first step we present this week an interview with Jatin Thaker from NXP to get a feeling about their thinking on these challenges.
Sincerely Yours
Ralf Schäfer, Consultant to DVN