Mechatronics Article Appears in Managing Automation

Mechatronics will pave the way for 90 percent of tomorrow's vehicle innovations. Today, however, the one million lines of mechatronics code embedded in the average vehicle accounts for up to 35 percent of the quality problems and 55 percent of the repair costs. With the nunmber of lines of mechantronics code expected to grow 50 to 100 times in the next few years, the question on the minds of automakers is what can be done to address quality problems associated with mechatronics. My article in the last January's issue of Managing Automation explores the technology solutions being proposed by PLM vendors to address the problem.