Every year there are thousands of students enrolled on automobile engineering and many of them start their careers as automobile engineers at OEMs, parts manufacturers, engineering services or testing solutions. For a new concept/design, one of the major challenges is to incorporate the design principles and physical data available in the current ecosystem. This can not only help to develop a new design in a shorter time but also reduce the number of prototypes and development costs. Currently, there are few tools available, but the major challenges are complexity and flexibility to use, annual licensing and scalability to the problem. There are many small OEMs / manufacturers and educational institutes which can not afford to buy licensing for different tools for individual tools.

My idea (work in progress) is to develop an AI-based micro-level design environment for automotive product development. The concept will work on AI principles with the micro level of calculation and benchmarking data bank. For example, someone wants to design a hollow camshaft for 1.5-litre 3 Cylinder Gasoline Engine with a hydroforming manufacturing process and target cost of xxx$. The inputs to this platform will be design + hollow + camshaft + 1.5L + 3CYL + Gasoline Engine + Manufacturing Process + Hydroforming + cost + xxx$. And the output will be a design calculation module based on these criteria for the engineer to design and iterate the camshaft.

The potential benefits of this tool will be

• Flexibility to the design engineer
• Less complexity and E2E design solution
• Saving time and money to design a new component.
• Improving productivity
• Automating tedious tasks
• Reducing waste for prototype/ testing
• Helping the institutes/students with automobile training
• Creating jobs
• Enabling product improvements

Currently, the standard tools are available with fixed modules at a very high cost. The marketplace for this idea will be

• Automobile OEMs
• Parts component manufactures
• Educational institutions
• Service providers

The development cost of this tool will not be very high, and it can be offered with an hourly licensing option.