Visualizing Logical Architecture of Electrical and Electronic (E/E) Systems in Automotive Industry

Sammanfattning: Modern vehicles equipped with many hardware and software systems. To develop new functionalities and maintain existing features of the vehicles, engineers have to check relationship between software and hardware systems. Due to complexity of these relationships, visual representation of how systems are working together is required to make R&D process easier. At Scania, engineers using node-link diagrams to represent logical function architecture of the Scania vehicles. Logical function architecture is a part of electrical and electronic systems in the automotive industry, due to size of these systems they are considered as a large network. Visualizing large networks by diagrams is not a new problem in literature. At past, researches published about diagram drawing and algorithms have been developed to generate good looking diagram. However, sometimes due to complexity of the data, having complex and unreadable diagrams are unavoidable and they are hard to understand. Previous studies investigated how diagrams should be drawn, however focus was not how users should interact with the diagrams. In node-link diagrams users follows edges to understand relationships between components. Having edges in the diagram heavily affects the diagram drawing time and also required space for the diagram. In this paper I developed an artefact which is not using edges to visualize LFA at Scania. Artefact usability has been tested with Scania engineers by giving some tasks to them. In the tests, artefact without edges achieved better results than node-link diagram and 426% improvement achieved by comparing task completion times in seconds. The artefact proved that it can be powerful alternative to classic node-link diagram visualization.