**Preface**

This reprint presents the current status of research activities concerning vehicle design processes. The design of vehicles is one of the most challenging tasks in engineering because of several reasons. The enormous consumer expectations as well as the intensive global competition aggravates vehicle design. Cost-driven design is a necessity and vehicles need to be economical in production, operation, and recycling; in fact, sustainable design is also imperative for ecological vehicles. The dynamics of vehicles have to be considered in the design of all components and light-weight design is of fundamental importance. Consumers expect convincing functional performance, high product quality, appealing appearance, high reliability, interconnected functionality as well as comprehensible and appealing user interfaces. More and more, additional services are connected to vehicles. These enormous requirements lead to complex multi-domain design processes of vehicles because most of the important decisions are made in the design phase. Production optimization and intelligent operation are important topics, but flaws and insufficiencies in the design stage lead to enormous expenditures in later stages and less-than-perfect products. The design processes of vehicles involve thousands of engineers are spread globally and need to consider multiple product versions and variants as well as multi-company product platforms. Very often, testing necessities and legal issues play an important role in these processes and the economic and ecological quality of the product has to be monitored throughout the processes. Even in the early stages, vehicle safety and ergonomic quality need to be considered. Needless to say, only digital support makes these processes feasible. For all domains, powerful computer tools for synthesis, analysis, evaluation, and optimization were created and numerous attempts try to sensibly link the data used in all these tools. However, many domain-specific and generic data formats as well as the sheer size of the data still create serious problems. It is important to note that design is also connected with scheduling and project management because certain design decisions can lead to long-term testing and production preparation processes. The listed challenges concerning the multi-domain design processes of vehicles lead to a prominent need for research activities aimed at supporting the designers in this endeavor; this reprint presents a collection of research activities in this area.

### **Ralf Stetter, Udo Pulm, and Markus Till**

*Editors*
