Major car manufacturers solved software integration problems with open-source architecture. Something for shipping?
By Ryan Skinner (email)
In the first part of this series, a Wilhelmsen manager described the challenges shipowners face with software integration issues. Failure to integrate components and data are creating noticeable costs, and risks. But how can the industry fix the situation? The automotive industry, it turns out, has seemingly conquered this problem.
In the 1990s, automakers saw the same kinds of increasing electronic sophistication as the shipping industry is seeing today. More and more of their products' value was getting tied up in software-dependent electrical and electronic components. And the suppliers of these components each used a proprietary system.
Naturally, carmakers viewed a development where they felt increasingly locked in to, and reliant on, specific vendors with increasing alarm. The answer from several carmakers, including BMW, DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and Toyota was AUTOSAR: AUTomotive Open System ARchitecture, which stands for an open, standardized software architecture for the automotive industry.
Said AUTOSAR spokesman Dr. Stefan Bunzel: "Switching from proprietary software to standardized software architecture offers cost and capacity benefits for everyone involved in automotive electronics development." He further describes AUTOSAR's goals "to define standards that will allow the reuse of hardware, software and architecture from one vehicle to another, while allowing the individual companies to maintain their distinctive intellectual property."
What he's saying, in other words, is that the carmakers were able to change their relationship to suppliers from one of dependency to one of plug and play. Now Mercedes-Benz could simply switch out a Bosch fuel injection system on its newest C-class with a Siemens one, without re-engineering the whole car. And complementary systems from different suppliers could be designed into a car model without struggling through a complicated integration process.
The AUTOSAR case is, unfortunately, not transferable directly to the realm of shipbuilding. First and foremost, AUTOSAR was able to leverage the power of a number of major carmakers in a relatively consolidated global automotive market. Shipowning and shipbuilding, on the other hand, are markets of many hundreds, if not thousands, of players. It would seem the organizational inertia, as far as numbers go, is with the big suppliers of shipping, and not the owners or builders.
In the next instalment of the series, we ask one of those big suppliers - none other than Wärtsilä - whether it's used its size to an advantage in terms of software integration.
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