VIRTUAL VEHICLE is an international research and development center which deals with application-oriented vehicle development and future vehicle concepts for road and rail. Currently, around 200 people are employed at the location in Graz, and their expertise enables the efficient development of affordable, safe and environmentally friendly vehicles.

The VIRTUAL VEHICLE Research Center (VIF) was founded in 2002. Since 2008 VIF has been a holding company of the Austrian COMET K2 research program K2-Mobility ‘Sustainable Vehicle Technologies’ an international institution building the bridge between fundamental research and application oriented vehicle development. This program offers an attractive cooperation and research platform in the vehicle industry. There are more than 200 employees at ViF, almost 90 % of them involved in research projects dealing with automotive and rail applications. As the main shareholder the Graz University of Technology (TUG) connects VIF to more than 20 institutes enabling technical innovations in virtual vehicle creation as well as offering access to funded projects. VIF aims at establishing an integrated and systematic approach in order to exploit the full optimization potential in all areas of vehicle development together with numerous national and international scientific and industrial partners.

Almost 90 % of the employees are involved in research projects dealing with automotive and rail applications.

Role

The SemI40 project is targeted in the department “Information and Process Management” at Virtual Vehicle Research Center (VIF). VIF has two major roles in SemI40: First of all, VIF is the leader of WP5 “Use Cases, Technical and Socio-Economic Impact”. WP5 focuses on supporting collection and finalization of use case descriptions and use case implementation, safeguarding project impact evaluation on a technical, economic and social level, and facilitating knowledge sharing between all technical work packages in the project. Moreover VIF participates in WP3 “Machine Learning and Automatic Decision Making” as a leader of the task “Domain Specific Challenges” responsible for the technical description of all WP3 use cases, and as a contributor to many other tasks supporting the implementation of the AVL use case.

Key contribution

Virtual Vehicle Research Center brings in its knowledge in requirements engineering, data analytics, software development and socio-technical evaluation. VIF aligns domain knowledge (virtual product development and production in vehicle industry), expert knowledge in computer science (information systems development, demonstration and evaluation), and methodical knowledge (requirements engineering and systems engineering). From the viewpoint of the semiconductor industry, VIF has the role of a neutral partner for assessing not only the technical, but especially the socio-economic impact of SemI40’s implemented use cases in the industrial pilots.