Title: Electrical, Controls and Software and System Engineering Process and Tool Systems Architect for General Motors Company

First Name / Prenom: Len

Last Name / Surname: Wozniak

Conference Sponsor: NA

Professional Affiliation: General Motors Company

Len Wozniak,

Len Wozniak is the Electrical, Controls and Software and System Engineering Process and Tool Systems Architect for General Motors Company. In this role Len is the lead architect for all Process and Tools used for systems engineering and the development of electronic controls and software globally by GM.

During his 24+ years with GM, Len has held most of the positions involved in the production of embedded controls from software developer to group manager to lead architect. Additionally he has worked with many automotive suppliers and OEMs as both a customer and supplier of embedded systems.

Len holds a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering from The University of Michigan and a M.S. degree in Embedded Controls from Purdue University.

General Motors faces an increasingly complex problem of systems engineering. Every year our product grows in complexity on many fronts.

Content complexity – each year additional features and systems are viewed as “base” features of the product. From advanced infotainment and connectivity systems to driver assistance to owner customizable lighting. Each of these features adds to the content and complexity of developed solutions resulting in systems as many as 100 electronic control units, 50+ data networks, 100,000s of interfaces and millions of lines of code. All of these electronics and software then has to interact with the 30,000+ mechanical parts that make up a modern automobile. This complexity will only continue to grow as more advanced technologies enable capabilities such as vehicle to infrastructure systems or advanced automated driving.

Legislative complexity – While content expands, so does the legislative environment. Each system faces complexities driven by both increasing legislated requirements and also increasing legislative variation. Each region or country determines their own requirements, but we need to engineering global products. This in turn leads to even more product complexity and product variants that need to be engineered.

Organizational complexity – To support increases in content and to leverage specialization and local market knowledge, our workforce continues to get both larger and more global. All projects will have many contributors distributed around the globe, but all of their work must integrate and function correctly for each iteration of development. Engineering has become a highly distributed 24 hour operation with the need for seamless coordination and handoff between regions.

Reuse complexity – To leverage global scale in a highly competitive environment, reuse is a critical capability. Each vehicle is a system of system and all contributing systems are reused across many vehicles. With 10,000,000 product instances in 10s of thousands of unique variants, very high degrees of reuse are essential to be competitive. The challenge is that to do effective engineering and analysis you need accurate representation of all of the thousands of variants and that is not possible to produce without extensive and accurate reuse of engineering data.

Systems Engineering methods and particularly Model Based Systems Engineering methods are essential to the successful management of this complexity, but traditional MBSE methods were not developed with this scale and complexity in mind. To deal with this growing challenge, General Motors has tailored existing modeling frameworks and developed an extensive model management systems including change management, configuration management, model integration, model dependency and model authoring systems. These methods go well beyond traditional MBSE methods and are essential to the use of MBSE at an enterprise level. The management of model assets has become a much larger problem than the actual modeling. Model Management; Coordinating the change, integration and sharing of systems models made up of thousands of integrated individual models created by thousands of contributing engineers for thousands of product configurations is the real challenge in the future of MBSE.