Online Test Scheduling in Car Production Lines

Cars with software-intensive features such as autonomous driving bring new opportunities to Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) and their manufacturing processes. The complexity of internal engineering processes is increasing as software-intensive functions are connected to electric and electronic car architectures, which need to be tested and enabled for functionality in car manufacturing. However, internal engineering processes can be simplified in car manufacturing by automating previously manual activities and flexibly managing variants. In this paper, we present a concept for managing the online scheduling of diagnostic tests during dynamic car manufacturing. We introduce the online scheduling of diagnostic tests on a high-performance car computer and compare the concept with state-of-the-art concepts for offline scheduling on remote production servers. To evaluate our concept, we conduct an OEM case study that shows that online scheduling not only reduces the total testing time in manufacturing while managing schedule variants more flexibly, but also increases the overall value added in car production by simplifying existing employee role models. We illustrate a scenario of how new car architectures can facilitate digital manufacturing processes.