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During development of complex automotive technologies, a significant engineering effort is often dedicated to ensuring the safe performance of these systems. An important aspect to consider when assessing the viability of different safety designs or strategies is the time period from the occurrence of a fault to the violation of a Safety Goal (SG). This time period is commonly referred to as the Fault Tolerant Time Interval (FTTI). In Automotive Safety, ISO 26262 [1] calls for the identification and appropriate partitioning of the FTTI, however very little guidance is provided on how to do this. This paper presents a process, covering the entire safety development lifecycle, for the identification of timing constraints and the development of associated requirements necessary to prevent Safety Goal violations.

One of the ways to reduce city congestion is to balance the traffic flow on the road network and maximally utilize all road capacities. There are examples showing that, if the drivers are not competitive but cooperative, the road network usage efficiency and the traffic conditions can be improved. This motivates the idea of designing a cooperative routing algorithm to benefit most vehicles on the road. This paper presents a semi-cooperative social routing algorithm for large transportation network with predictive traffic density information. The goal is to integrate a cooperative scheme into the individual routing and achieve short traveling time not only for the traveler itself, but also for all vehicles in the road network. The most important concept of this algorithm is that the route is generated with the awareness of the total travel time added to all other vehicles on the road due to the increased congestion.

Position of the H-point plays a vital role during designing the seating system. The seating system provides support and comfort to the occupants while they are operating the vehicle. The traditional way to design a seat system is to use rules of thumb and experience, which often results in several costly design iterations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate the capability of CAE analytical tool to find the H-point at the early phase of the seating system design without compromising the comfort level of the occupant. The recently launched Lincoln Continental front seating system was used to validate this purpose. The Continental seating system has unique design features which provide special challenges in designing and simulating the seat. With the help of CAE analytical tool, the traditional process is streamlined and a seat design could be achieved in a shorter period with greater accuracy.

The demand for seating comfort is growing - in cars as well as trucks and other commercial vehicles. This is expected as the seat is the largest surface area of the vehicle that is in contact with the occupant. While it is predominantly luxury cars that have been equipped with climate controlled seats, there is now a clear trend toward this feature becoming available in mid-range and compact cars. The main purpose of climate controlled seats is to create an agreeable microclimate that keeps the driver comfortable. It also reduces the “stickiness” feeling which is reported by perspiring occupants on leather-covered seats. As part of the seat design process, a physical test is performed to record and evaluate the life cycle and the performance at ambient and extreme temperatures for the climate controlled seats as well as their components. The test calls for occupied and unoccupied seats at several ambient temperatures.