The new Automotive Interoperability Lab at the Fraunhofer Institute FOKUS in Berlin offers research and development services for automobile manufacturers and suppliers in the field of the development and testing of software-intensive automotive electronic systems. The Automotive Lab’s open service proposition is neither geared nor biased to any particular company but rather dedicated to supporting the competitiveness and the future of the whole European automobile and supplier industry through the promotion of optimized methods and innovative information and communication technology.

With the Automotive Interoperability Lab car manufacturers, suppliers, service providers and tool vendors can select between an individually configured or overarching communication and development platform and join forces with a team of research scientists and experts. The Lab serves as a network for facilitating the exchange of views and experiences, and also realizes early innovation drivers in the form of prototypes – from applications in the field of Car-To-X and infotainment through to safety and comfort enhancing driver assistance systems with large numbers of electrical and electronic components.

The Automotive Interoperability Lab is a development hub for innovative development methods and technologies designed to meet future challenges in Automotive Engineering. How traditional development processes in Automotive Engineering can be still further optimized through the use of model-based development methods is clearly and compelling shown, evaluated and tested using prototypes and driving simulators from industrial research. The focus is squarely on methods for raising efficiency and reducing costs which are now the two main factors with decisive impact on the specification and development of onboard software and automotive electronics. Thus the hallmark show cases of the lab illustrate automotive functional models for extra safety, tool coupling for end-to-end process consistency and virtual product development in an interdisciplinary environment.

Technologies developed in the Automotive Interoperability Lab support automotive processes in terms of ensuring compliance with standards, guidelines and conventions, best practices and levels of maturity through automatic inspection, correction and evaluation. Simple integration in a development environment enables partners of the lab to experience whole new functions in quality assurance – especially when what they want is efficient implementation of consistent quality standards using multi-process and multi-tool guidelines. Multi-tool methods of quality assurance, and software tools that increase quality through inspection, testing and auto-correction whilst also reducing costs, are the new ways forward in Automotive Engineering which the lab takes up and pioneers.

The Automotive Interoperability Lab’s Partner Platform offers you a unique chance to dialogue with automotive experts in an exclusive engineering environment, and gives you entry to the world of applied research. The Lab is a framework for prototype development and for dialogue between industry and issue-oriented research groups. Workshops offer interested parties high caliber information on a wide range of research projects and studies, and through the richness of dialogue also function as trend scouts, pinpointing the most promising developments. Apart from workshops, seminars are also organized that bring together and network users from a wide variety of disciplines, and promote individual contact with highly qualified partners, research scientists and standardization committees.