Innovation Management System Assessment and Benchmarking

TIMS (Training in Innovation Management System for Sustainable SMEs) is an EU Erasmus+ project which analyzed the ISO (International Standardisation Organisation) 56000 innovation management system norm parts and configured in 2022 an ISO 56000-based innovation assessment portal. This system allows self-assessment, independent expert assessment, and benchmarking for innovation management. In 2023, a competence matrix and related training materials to support the implementation of ISO 56000 is developed. The ISO 56000-based assessment tool applied ISO 33020 for process capability assessment for ISO 56000 and this allows us to determine the capability of ISO 56000 processes. This paper gives an overview of which processes have been derived from ISO 56000 and how the PAM (Innovation Process Assessment Model) is structured. Since ISO 33020 provides a standard method to determine process attributes and capability level profiles of innovation management system processes, the method also allows a Europe (and worldwide) benchmarking of the capability of innovation management systems. The objective of TIMS is to establish an assessment system and training to roll out ISO 56000 to the European industry. The tools and training materials will be used by universities in lecturing programs and by innovation agents in the industry

Cybersecurity threat analysis, risk assessment and design patterns for automotive networked embedded systems: A case study

Cybersecurity has become a crucial challenge in the automotive sector. At the current stage, the framework described by the ISO/SAE 21434 is insufficient to derive concrete methods for the design of secure automotive networked embedded systems on the supplier level. This article describes a case study with actionable steps for designing secure systems and systematically eliciting traceable cybersecurity requirements to address this gap. The case study is aligned with the ISO/SAE 21434 standard and can provide the basis for integrating cybersecurity engineering into company-specific processes and practice specifications.Web of Science27884983

Improvements for Product Safety Requirements Compliance Management Practices Case Study: Automotive Battery Industry

Recently, advancements in technology improve product safety considerations globally. High-tech equipment and tools become more accessible for organizations to manage manufacturing effectively and safely. In this way, they focus on producing safer products that are qualified for public consumption. With the introduction of clean energy technologies on roads, product safety discussions about electric vehicles increased simultaneously. Especially for globally operating battery manufacturers, demonstrating their compliance with international regulations, standardizations, and customer requirements poses difficulties. Unreliable and inadequate compliance management processes may obstruct operations and decrease competition capability in the global market. Throughout this thesis, safety-related requirements compliance inside an EV battery manufacturer company is investigated in accordance with a combined compliance management model. This model comprises the following steps: identifying and discovering the requirements, interpreting the requirements, identifying possible changes required in products or operations, identifying and evaluating compliance risks, compliance decisions specifying a method of compliance, communication, implementation, and evaluation and monitoring. In this thesis, safety-related requirements cover regulations, legislations, standards, and customer-specific requirements. A qualitative research approach with a descriptive case study is adopted in the thesis in order to provide in-depth outcomes related to the research topic. The findings from investigation of literature and semi-structured interviews are utilized in the process of discovering the company’s current status and encountered problems in management of compliance with product safety requirements. With the help of the findings and examination of the best practices regarding compliance management processes, improvement opportunities for the EV battery manufacturer company are recommended. The findings of the thesis show although the current applications of the case company in management of compliance with product safety requirements are not in poor quality, there still exist some parts to improve their insufficiencies and missing sides. Need for more skilled people for interpreting and comparing the requirements with the company’s operations, confronting language differences in discovering global requirements, not having an efficient communication process, and unclear responsibilities are some of the findings of the research as improvement needs. This thesis proposes possible enhancement activities for the company by exploring literature, and previously conducted research related to best practices for management of compliance with product safety requirements. Different solutions are listed as following: management system adoption, efficient documentation, regular compliance checks, global design file, benchmarking, external support, requirements follow-up by product safety people, platform to reach all customers, international networking, product safety and compliance plan, attending to standards drafting processes, comparison between different market standards, global product committee, defining common minimum requirements, and continuous training for people involved in product safety. Overall, this study contributes to the company and academics in the context of managing compliance of product safety requirements for globally operating manufacturers by investigating previous studies, regulations, standards and an EV battery manufacturer company

The Digital Transformation of Automotive Businesses: THREE ARTEFACTS TO SUPPORT DIGITAL SERVICE PROVISION AND INNOVATION

Digitalisation and increasing competitive pressure drive original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to switch their focus towards the provision of digital services and open-up towards increased collaboration and customer integration. This shift implies a significant transformational change from product to product-service providers, where OEMs realign themselves within strategic, business and procedural dimensions. Thus, OEMs must manage digital transformation (DT) processes in order to stay competitive and remain adaptable to changing customer demands. However, OEMs aspiring to become participants or leaders in their domain, struggle to initiate activities as there is a lack of applicable instruments that can guide and support them during this process. Compared to the practical importance of DT, empirical studies are not comprehensive. This study proposes three artefacts, validated within case companies that intend to support automotive OEMs in digital service provisioning. Artefact one, a layered conceptual model for a digital automotive ecosystem, was developed by means of 26 expert interviews. It can serve as a useful instrument for decision makers to strategically plan and outline digital ecosystems. Artefact two is a conceptual reference framework for automotive service systems. The artefact was developed based on an extensive literature review, and the mapping of the business model canvas to the service system domain. The artefact intends to assist OEMs in the efficient conception of digital services under consideration of relevant stakeholders and the necessary infrastructures. Finally, artefact three proposes a methodology by which to transform software readiness assessment processes to fit into the agile software development approach with consideration of the existing operational infrastructure. Overall, the findings contribute to the empirical body of knowledge about the digital transformation of manufacturing industries. The results suggest value creation for digital automotive services occurs in networks among interdependent stakeholders in which customers play an integral role during the services’ life-cycle. The findings further indicate the artefacts as being useful instruments, however, success is dependent on the integration and collaboration of all contributing departments.:Table of Contents Bibliographic Description II Acknowledgment III Table of Contents IV List of Figures VI List of Tables VII List of Abbreviations VIII 1 Introduction 1 1.1 Motivation and Problem Statement 1 1.2 Objective and Research Questions 6 1.3 Research Methodology 7 1.4 Contributions 10 1.5 Outline 12 2 Background 13 2.1 From Interdependent Value Creation to Digital Ecosystems 13 2.1.1 Digitalisation Drives Collaboration 13 2.1.2 Pursuing an Ecosystem Strategy 13 2.1.3 Research Gaps and Strategy Formulation Obstacles 20 2.2 From Products to Product-Service Solutions 22 2.2.1 Digital Service Fulfilment Requires Co-Creational Networks 22 2.2.2 Enhancing Business Models with Digital Services 28 2.2.3 Research Gaps and Service Conception Obstacles 30 2.3 From Linear Development to Continuous Innovation 32 2.3.1 Digital Innovation Demands Digital Transformation 32 2.3.2 Assessing Digital Products 36 2.3.3 Research Gaps and Implementation Obstacles 38 3 Artefact 1: Digital Automotive Ecosystems 41 3.1 Meta Data 41 3.2 Summary 42 3.3 Designing a Layered Conceptual Model of a Digital Ecosystem 45 4 Artefact 2: Conceptual Reference Framework 79 4.1 Meta Data 79 4.2 Summary 80 4.3 On the Move Towards Customer-Centric Automotive Business Models 83 5 Artefact 3: Agile Software Readiness Assessment Procedures 121 5.1 Meta Data 121 5.2 Meta Data 122 5.3 Summary 123 5.4 Adding Agility to Software Readiness Assessment Procedures 126 5.5 Continuous Software Readiness Assessments for Agile Development 147 6 Conclusion and Future Work 158 6.1 Contributions 158 6.1.1 Strategic Dimension: Artefact 1 158 6.1.2 Business Dimension: Artefact 2 159 6.1.3 Process Dimension: Artefact 3 161 6.1.4 Synthesis of Contributions 163 6.2 Implications 167 6.2.1 Scientific Implications 167 6.2.2 Managerial Implications 168 6.2.3 Intelligent Parking Service Example (ParkSpotHelp) 171 6.3 Concluding Remarks 174 6.3.1 Threats to Validity 174 6.3.2 Outlook and Future Research Recommendations 174 Appendix VII Bibliography XX Wissenschaftlicher Werdegang XXXVII Selbständigkeitserklärung XXXVII

Software development and correction estimation in the automotive domain

Während der letzten Jahrzehnte hat sich Software in alle Lebensbereiche ausgebreitet. Die kontinuierlich steigenden Kundenanforderungen ließen auch die Komplexität steigen, bei gleichbleibender Produktqualität. Analysedaten und diverse Beispiele entstammen der Automobildomäne, die einen sicherheitskritischen Bereich darstellt, in dem Produkte mit speziellen Qualitätsanforderungen entwickelt werden. Qualitätsanforderungen müssen von diversen Prozessen und Standards bedient werden, bei gleichzeitiger Einhaltung enger Endtermine. Die Komplexität der Software und der Safety-Aspekt beeinflussen die Fehlerquote der Produkte stark. Viele Anforderungen werden während der Entwicklung hinzugefügt oder verändert und führen zu permanenten Änderungen in der Software und einer weiteren Steigerung der Komplexität. Änderungen müssen analysiert und getestet werden, um die Qualität des entstehenden Produktes zu gewährleisten. Die Vorhersage von Defekten und Änderungen in der Software sind ein wichtiger Anteil des Software Engineering. Die industrielle Software-Entwicklung muss ihr Ziel innerhalb diverser Grenzen erreichen, ganz wichtig ist das Budget, wobei sich Änderungen an Projektparametern negativ auf das geplante Budget auswirken können. Solche Änderungen werden in zwei Klassen eingeteilt, durch Kunden verursachte neue oder veränderte Anforderungen, und die Korrekturen, die durch Systemverbesserungen oder Fehlerbehebungen entstehen, beide Klassen für das Projekt-Budget relevant. Die Aufwände für die neuen Kundenanforderungen können dem Budget einfach aufgeschlagen werden. Die Korrekturen verursachen ebenfalls große Aufwände, die zu einem negativen Budget führen können, was eine große Herausforderung für das Projektmanagement wie auch die automatisierte Schätzung der Aufwände über die gesamte Projektlaufzeit darstellt.Over the past decades, software has spread to most areas of our lives. The complexity increased due to steadily increasing customer demands and, at the same time, the high quality of the products had to be kept. The data for the analyses and many of the examples are taken out of the automotive software development domain. The automotive domain is a safety-critical area where products are developed with specific quality requirements. These quality requirements have to be met by many processes and by satisfying several standards within stipulated deadlines during the development lifecycle. The complexity of the software and the safety aspect have a strong influence on the product defect ratio. Many requirements will be added and adjusted during the development lifecycle leading to continuous changes in the software and increased complexity. All these changes need to be analyzed and tested to ensure the quality of the product. Predicting software defects and changes is a significant part of software engineering. Industrial software development has to achieve its target within several boundaries. One of the important boundaries for an industrial project is the budget, where changes of any project parameters can easily lead to negative effects in the planned budget. Such changes are classified into two types, the changes pushed by the customer as new requirements or changed requirements, and the correction changes in the project because of improvements of the system and identified bugs with their fixes. This classification is important to control the project budget. The effort for the realization of new customer changes can be estimated and added to the budget. The correction changes also cause huge efforts, which can lead to a negative budget in the project which is a big challenge for the project management, the automated calculation of effort estimations for the complete development life-cycle. This thesis offers a new model to improve the effort estimation from multiple perspectives. This model also integrates follow-up-defects in later process phases. Thus, the defect cost flow is part of the model and enables the management defects and follow-up defects which could spread throughout the development phases. The newly developed model was successfully evaluated in the automotive domain. The overall accuracy of the effort estimations was improved by 80%

Beacons of Excellence in Stress Prevention

NoThis report describes the work of Robertson Cooper Ltd and UMIST to identify good practice in stress prevention and then identify organisations within the UK that could be called beacons of excellence in comparison to this model. Part one of this report summarises and draws conclusions from all of the substantive academic studies on stress prevention over the last decade and uses this information, as well as advice gained from a panel of international experts, to develop a comprehensive stress prevention model. Part two of the report uses this model to describe examples of stress prevention practices that Robertson Cooper Ltd has identified within a wide range of UK organisations. Case studies are presented for each aspect of the good practice model. Examples of real documentation and organisational practice are presented.Health and Safety Executive (HSE

Algorithms and methodologies for interconnect reliability analysis of integrated circuits

The phenomenal progress of computing devices has been largely made possible by the sustained efforts of semiconductor industry in innovating techniques for extremely large-scale integration. Indeed, gigantically integrated circuits today contain multi-billion interconnects which enable the transistors to talk to each other -all in a space of few mm2. Such aggressively downscaled components (transistors and interconnects) silently suffer from increasing electric fields and impurities/defects during manufacturing. Compounded by the Gigahertz switching, the challenges of reliability and design integrity remains very much alive for chip designers, with Electro migration (EM) being the foremost interconnect reliability challenge. Traditionally, EM containment revolves around EM guidelines, generated at single-component level, whose non-compliance means that the component fails. Failure usually refers to deformation due to EM -manifested in form of resistance increase, which is unacceptable from circuit performance point of view. Subsequent aspects deal with correct-by-construct design of the chip followed by the signoff-verification of EM reliability. Interestingly, chip designs today have reached a dilemma point of reduced margin between the actual and reliably allowed current densities, versus, comparatively scarce system-failures. Consequently, this research is focused on improved algorithms and methodologies for interconnect reliability analysis enabling accurate and design-specific interpretation of EM events. In the first part, we present a new methodology for logic-IP (cell) internal EM verification: an inadequately attended area in the literature. Our SPICE-correlated model helps in evaluating the cell lifetime under any arbitrary reliability speciation, without generating additional data - unlike the traditional approaches. The model is apt for today's fab less eco-system, where there is a) increasing reuse of standard cells optimized for one market condition to another (e.g., wireless to automotive), as well as b) increasing 3rd party content on the chip requiring a rigorous sign-off. We present results from a 28nm production setup, demonstrating significant violations relaxation and flexibility to allow runtime level reliability retargeting. Subsequently, we focus on an important aspect of connecting the individual component-level failures to that of the system failure. We note that existing EM methodologies are based on serial reliability assumption, which deems the entire system to fail as soon as the first component in the system fails. With a highly redundant circuit topology, that of a clock grid, in perspective, we present algorithms for EM assessment, which allow us to incorporate and quantify the benefit from system redundancies. With the skew metric of clock-grid as a failure criterion, we demonstrate that unless such incorporations are done, chip lifetimes are underestimated by over 2x. This component-to-system reliability bridge is further extended through an extreme order statistics based approach, wherein, we demonstrate that system failures can be approximated by an asymptotic kth-component failure model, otherwise requiring costly Monte Carlo simulations. Using such approach, we can efficiently predict a system-criterion based time to failure within existing EDA frameworks. The last part of the research is related to incorporating the impact of global/local process variation on current densities as well as fundamental physical factors on EM. Through Hermite polynomial chaos based approach, we arrive at novel variations-aware current density models, which demonstrate significant margins (> 30 %) in EM lifetime when compared with the traditional worst case approach. The above research problems have been motivated by the decade-long work experience of the author dealing with reliability issues in industrial SoCs, first at Texas Instruments and later at Qualcomm.L'espectacular progrés dels dispositius de càlcul ha estat possible en gran part als esforços de la indústria dels semiconductors en proposar tècniques innovadores per circuits d'una alta escala d'integració. Els circuits integrats contenen milers de milions d'interconnexions que permeten connectar transistors dins d'un espai de pocs mm2. Tots aquests components estan afectats per camps elèctrics, impureses i defectes durant la seva fabricació. Degut a l’activitat a nivell de Gigahertzs, la fiabilitat i integritat són reptes importants pels dissenyadors de xips, on la Electromigració (EM) és un dels problemes més importants. Tradicionalment, el control de la EM ha girat entorn a directrius a nivell de component. L'incompliment d’alguna de les directrius implica un alt risc de falla. Per falla s'entén la degradació deguda a la EM, que es manifesta en forma d'augment de la resistència, la qual cosa és inacceptable des del punt de vista del rendiment del circuit. Altres aspectes tenen a veure amb la correcta construcció del xip i la verificació de fiabilitat abans d’enviar el xip a fabricar. Avui en dia, el disseny s’enfronta a dilemes importants a l’hora de definir els marges de fiabilitat dels xips. És un compromís entre eficiència i fiabilitat. La recerca en aquesta tesi se centra en la proposta d’algorismes i metodologies per a l'anàlisi de la fiabilitat d'interconnexió que permeten una interpretació precisa i específica d'esdeveniments d'EM. A la primera part de la tesi es presenta una nova metodologia pel disseny correcte-per-construcció i verificació d’EM a l’interior de les cel·les lògiques. Es presenta un model SPICE correlat que ajuda a avaluar el temps de vida de les cel·les segons qualsevol especificació arbitrària de fiabilitat i sense generar cap dada addicional, al contrari del que fan altres tècniques. El model és apte per l'ecosistema d'empreses de disseny quan hi ha a) una reutilització creixent de cel·les estàndard optimitzades per unes condicions de mercat i utilitzades en un altre (p.ex. de wireless a automoció), o b) la utilització de components del xip provinents de terceres parts i que necessiten una verificació rigorosa. Es presenten resultats en una tecnologia de 28nm, demostrant relaxacions significatives de les regles de fiabilitat i flexibilitat per permetre la reavaluació de la fiabilitat en temps d'execució. A continuació, el treball tracta un aspecte important sobre la relació entre les falles dels components i les falles del sistema. S'observa que les tècniques existents es basen en la suposició de fiabilitat en sèrie, que porta el sistema a fallar tant aviat hi ha un component que falla. Pensant en topologies redundants, com la de les graelles de rellotge, es proposen algorismes per l'anàlisi d'EM que permeten quantificar els beneficis de la redundància en el sistema. Utilitzant com a mètrica l’esbiaixi del senyal de rellotge, es demostra que la vida dels xips pot arribar a ser infravalorada per un factor de 2x. Aquest pont de fiabilitat entre component i sistema es perfecciona a través d'una tècnica basada en estadístics d'ordre extrem on es demostra que les falles poden ser aproximades amb un model asimptòtic de fallada de l'ièssim component, evitant així simulacions de Monte Carlo costoses. Amb aquesta tècnica, es pot predir eficientment el temps de fallada a nivell de sistema utilitzant eines industrials. La darrera part de la recerca està relacionada amb avaluar l'impacte de les variacions de procés en les densitats de corrent i factors físics de la EM. Mitjançant una tècnica basada en polinomis d'Hermite s'han obtingut uns nous models de densitat de corrent que mostren millores importants (>30%) en l'estimació de la vida del sistema comprades amb les tècniques basades en el cas pitjor. La recerca d'aquesta tesi ha estat motivada pel treball de l'autor durant més d'una dècada tractant temes de fiabilitat en sistemes, primer a Texas Instruments i després a Qualcomm.Postprint (published version