Groundbreaking ceremony for the Cognizant Mobility Rhein-Main Test Center
With the planned opening of the Rhein-Main Test Center on October 24, 2024, Cognizant Mobility is underlining its own capabilities in the field of software testing and electrical/electronic integration. In addition to the so-called E/E complete vehicle testing, in which the interaction of software and hardware is tested in particular, vehicle manufacturers will also have access to a cost-optimized, global network for testing and validation tasks in the future. Cognizant Mobility's expanded offering is intended to support German vehicle manufacturers and system suppliers, who according to numerous studies have some catching up to do, particularly in the software environment.
What began a few months ago with a ground-breaking ceremony in Rüsselsheim will now be officially opened at the end of October. In the future, vehicles from international vehicle manufacturers will be put through their paces in over 1,300 square meters of workshop space with an excellent charging infrastructure. To be more precise, this is the so-called E/E complete vehicle and integration testing. The interaction between the installed electronic components, the control units and the software running on them will be tested for both prototypes and vehicle models that are already available. According to numerous studies, many German vehicle manufacturers have lost touch with the world leaders in software and IT. The testing of software and installed hardware is regarded as a key discipline for keeping vehicles competitive and catching up with lost development progress.
A typical use case is the introduction of a new software version on all vehicles in a fleet. Before rolling out these over-the-air updates, Cognizant Mobility teams will in future meticulously search for errors in the manufacturer's new software and check compatibility with the control units installed in the vehicles placed in the test center. The many different vehicle, market and equipment variants make this task a highly complex science. Cognizant Mobility already uses highly automated and in some cases even autonomous test benches to counter this complexity. The company also relies on a tried-and-tested global network of development experts and distributed vehicle areas. Test tasks are distributed “around the globe” and “around the clock” from Germany via another test center in Romania to India. On the one hand, this saves costs for OEM customers and, on the other hand, enables the breadth and depth of testing to be significantly increased. Together with new technology trends such as the virtualization of control units and the associated possibilities of virtual testing through digital twins, which the experts are working on in parallel, Cognizant Mobility is also becoming a one-stop shop for the future challenges of car manufacturers and their system suppliers.