Decision making for automotive-platform engineering: A mixed-methods study on practitioners’ requirements and criteria

• Software has become a primary concern in the automotive industry. • There is a lack of decision-making support for managing automotive platforms. • Practitioners need efficient processes and tools for product-structuring concepts. • We prioritize requirements for decision making for electrics/electron platforms. With modern vehicles becoming increasingly software driven, long-standing automotive manufacturers face challenges in integrating software into their historically hardware-centered platforms. Even though hardware and software platforms leverage the same ideas, manufacturers must still unify hardware, software, and electrics/electron components; as well as their intricate interconnections and variability. To address this challenge, automotive manufacturers are adopting product-structuring and variant-management concepts from different areas to develop a holistic platform perspective. Here, particularly decision making has manifested as a key problem to inform the involved stakeholders and assess different options. Specifically, simply adding software to a static hardware platform is insufficient to address the current digital transformation in the automotive industry: the new platform dimensions must be understood, changes balanced against each other, and necessary rework defined to achieve holistic platform management. In this article, we contribute to tackling this problem by presenting a mixed-method study through which we derived a set of requirements to support decision-making for today’s automotive electrics/electron platforms. We used requirements and insights from our previous work, which we refined and validated via expert workshops and a questionnaire with 76 experts from the automotive industry. Besides confirming and validating our previous work, we contribute a new consolidated overview of requirements and criteria together with a prioritization by practitioners. The findings of our work offer valuable guidance for automotive practitioners, particularly for adopting product-structuring concepts like electrics/electron platforms and making decisions in the process. Our contributions further substantiate existing evidence and can guide research on developing decision-making techniques for complex electrics/electron platforms.