Virtual Reality for Efficient Vehicle Lifecycle Management

Abstract

A clear trend in the automotive industry is that the manufacturers outsource more development work to subcontractors. Consequently, the overall quality of the finished product will depend on how well the automotive companies and the subcontractors work together in the development processes. Lack of harmonization between the subcontractors and the automotive company – but also between different development departments at the manufacturer – causes expensive errors. Therefore, methods and tools have to be developed to support the whole development process and these have to be easy to work with, in order to be applicable. Although research in virtual reality has been done for over 10 years, only a few years ago the non-academic world started to evaluate its use to solve real-world problems. Among others, the automotive industry is evaluating its potential in design, development, and manufacturing processes. In fact, the automotive industry has been among the first, but others, such as suppliers, have begun to evaluate VR, too. The expected benefits of using Virtual Technologies are, therefore, the reduction of development time (it enables the concurrent engineering), the reduction of development costs (better design through virtual pre-checks, less modifications) and increasing quality.