Original Abstract:

The number of new battery electric vehicles coming to market employing new battery technology is ever increasing. In this highly competitive vehicle segment, time to market plays a crucial role in securing market share, and, hence, economical viability. The battery development process is currently on the critical path in the development process of battery electric vehicles and the continued push to put products on the market faster while maintaining reliability and durability requirements poses a big challenge for OEMs. In order to reduce the battery development cycles by over 30% several crucial challenges must be tackled. Amongst them, the sequential development of cells and module/pack is a crucial issue that must be overcome to achieve the set targets. First time right in making design decisions when it comes to battery safety is another critical element. Furthermore, long-term durability tests such as HTOE and PTCE that last 10 months or more each and must be run in two prototype sample generations currently pose a hard limit in development duration.

This paper will discuss how the use of digital twins starting from cell modeling, consistent use of model-based systems engineering approaches, virtual validation and AI supported data analytics methods are deployed to be able to parallelize the development and validation of sub-systems and key-components to accelerate the battery development cycle by over 30%. In addition to the hardware development, the link to the associated battery management system and frequent SW releases as part of an agile development process is discussed in view of the overall product development cycle duration target.