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Automotive Product Development organisations are challenged with ever increasing levels of systems complexity driven by the introduction of new technologies to address environmental concerns and enhance customer satisfaction within a highly competitive and cost conscious market. The technical difficulty associated with the engineering of complex automotive systems is compounded by the increase in sophistication of the control systems needed to manage the integration of technology packages. Most automotive systems have an electro-mechanical structure with control and software features embedded within the system. The conventional methods for design analysis and synthesis are engineering discipline focused (mechanical, electrical, electronic, control, software).

Adoption of new technology with ever increasing complexity challenges organizational structures and processes as subsystem ownership crosses several powertrain subsystem boundaries (and thereby involves multiple departments). Integrating such technology without introducing inadvertent failure modes can be a difficult task. This paper illustrates an upfront approach to understanding the potential system impact of using an example new technology. In product development activities involving primarily reuse of known technologies, organizational and subsystem boundaries are generally clear. Interfaces are well established and responsibilities for managing failure mode avoidance are generally known. Implementation of new technology which does not naturally fit the well-established organizational definitions and boundaries presents distinctive challenges to system design, system integration, and verification using failure mode avoidance (FMA).