Designing and Testing Electronic Body Systems at Jaguar

"It is a mistake to take good electronic body system (EBS) design for granted. Functions such as exterior lighting, windscreen cleaning, and locking are highly visible to the customer. A superbly engineered locking system is unlikely to convince them to buy your product, but a poorly engineered one will certainly reduce the chances of their buying another.
 
While EBS systems that are intuitive, logical, and consistent reinforce the image of a high-quality vehicle, they are becoming increasingly challenging to design. Nowadays, more and more of the control is performed automatically, to increase driver convenience, and controls are becoming increasingly distributed, to reduce the amount of wiring in the vehicle and free up interior space.
 
At Jaguar, design requirements like these were placing a strain on our traditional development approach and making it difficult for EBS development engineers to deliver their designs on time. We found our solution in a virtual integration and test automation laboratory?"
 
By Rich Humphrey and Alexandros Mouzakitis, Jaguar Cars
 
This article appeared in The MathWorks News & Notes, October 2006