During the past decade, Volvo Cars Corp. has carried out numerous Model-Based Development (MBD) projects, all providing different experiences of the impact of MBD. Today, the present connectivity and electrification challenges call for a more time-efficient and software-oriented development strategy. The goal is continuous deployment, in which developing new features at R&D, deploying them on real or virtual cars, and getting real(istic) customer feedback to R&D can be completed within days.

For Volvo Cars, this means changing a large and complex organization often used to requirements engineering, with modeling tool chains still under development and, considering the electrification, lots of new technology. Nevertheless, ongoing projects with key groups at R&D in close collaboration with research teams at Göteborg University and Chalmers University aim to deliver proof of concept using seamless model-based integration and VR rigs. We also consider AUTOSAR, providing standardized software architecture and facilitated supplier collaboration, as a plausible road to large-scale seamless MBD. The present challenges include large-scale model-based integration, automation, unified modeling standards, and scalable agile MBD.

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the Swedish innovation agency Vinnova and the XEVCO project.