Business driven engineering for powertrain industry

The Market for the automation industry is rapidly changing and there is tougher competition and greater demand for higher quality products with lower cost and faster delivery to market. However in today's economy, the extra cost for higher quality has to be supported by lowering the production costs and optimizing the resources. In this regard, the powertrain sector of the automobile industry has been the focus of research collaboration between Loughborough University and Ford Motor Company to provide a new approach to the design and reuse of automation systems. In this article work-in-progress is reported which outlines the development of a set of engineering services and its associated engineering application tools. This is aimed to enable industrial end users to enhance the reconfigurability and agility of their development environment via the use of virtual engineering and component-based approaches.