Over the last decades, efforts on vehicle design have been guided in the direction of development time and production costs reduction, while increasing the product reliability and market oriented concepts.This paper describes a development strategy using an innovative modular construction, shared engineering capacity and modern tools to create a bus chassis design which fulfills engineering, production and market needs.The development was done by two different engineering organizations, of the same corporation, working together with a simultaneous engineering philosophy in order use specific competencies of both areas.The goal was to build the minimum amount of prototypes to perform specific functional and endurance tests. Those relied on functional and structural simulation loops to predict specific weak points that were optimized during the development. The result is an optimum design with great expectation on fulfilling all the technical imposed requirements.As conclusion for this work, the desired production flexibility to build different combinations using some basic components was fulfilled. The share of responsibility between the competence areas brought benefits when optimizing the men power inside the corporation. And the use of modern engineering tools brought the expected benefits to the project reducing the time to market and development costs.
Modular Bus Chassis Development Using Modern Simultaneous Engineering Tools
Sae Technical Papers
International Mobility Technology Conference and Exhibit ; 2001
2001-03-05
Conference paper
English