Special type of cooperation

Their work has mostly been time-limited and restricted to certain specialist areas in the form of thesis work, internships or dissertations. Research questions, however, are becoming increasingly complex, especially in car manufacturing, not least due to the large number of statutory and social requirements involved. Just a few months' joint cooperation on such questions involving just one discipline is often insufficient to resolve them adequately.

CAR@TUM or the "Munich Centre of Automotive Research" will provide a defined framework for this decade-long cooperation between the BMW Group and the Technical University of Munich, incorporating various interdisciplinary high-tech projects within it. What's special about CAR@TUM is the length of the projects, which is set according to their feasibility as dissertation topics. Moreover the joint research work is not concentrated on a single chair but instead is given an interdisciplinary slant through the linking of different areas. The operative cooperation is steered by a controlling committee that includes four representatives from the Technical University of Munich and four BMW representatives respectively. The chairmen are Dr. Klaus Draeger, a member of BMW AG's board of directors and responsible for Development and Purchasing, and Prof. Wolfgang Dr Herrmann, President of the TU Munich.

At the moment around 40 postgraduates and BMW partners are working on six different high-tech projects covering a wide range of areas such as energy management and man-machine interaction, with 25 chairs involved. Although the majority of these projects involve students from the engineering, electrical engineering, information technology, informatics, mathematics and physics departments, they also, in some cases, include students from such supposedly unusual disciplines as psychology. Despite the close relationship between the industrial partner and the neighbouring disciplines, the fundamental connection to the chair remains intact.

One project example is the energy management project. Under the leadership of Walter Hübner this working group is working on the comprehensive recording of all energy flows within a vehicle in order to determine the long-term optimization potential for the reduction of fuel consumption. The research team is examining which parts of a vehicle consume the most energy in the form of electricity, heat or mechanical performance. This in turn allows the vehicle's energy-related weak points to be determined as well as its strengths, and the gathered data will serve as the starting point for the long-term reduction of vehicle fuel consumption and ultimately CO2 emissions.

Worthy of note about this project is the fact that the BMW Group began carrying out intensive research work on the area of energy management more than five years ago, in other words long before the start of the current discussion on climate change and the environment. "Thanks to the energy management project we have been focusing on the environment for some time, despite the fact that it has only recently become a hot topic", explains Walter Hübner proudly. His team's investigations have highlighted which vehicle components use the greatest amount of energy, and the next step is to identify ways in which the environment can be aided in the long term. Another important finding by the working group has been that individual vehicle components, as soon as they are brought into interplay with other components, behave in a totally differently manner. The next step then is to carefully examine whether the improvement in the energy performance of a certain component possibly leads to a deterioration in the performance of another.

Another project is the "man-machine interaction" project. In this case Dr Klaus Bengler and his team of four are carrying out research into a completely different area, with the postgraduate team’s research work concentrated on the design of intuitive operation concepts in vehicles. One focus for the project is research into so-called ergonomic man-machine communication. This refers to the computer-aided expansion of the interface between man and machine, so that as many human senses as possible are called into play. The MMI team's target is to examine how speech operation in vehicles could be made more natural, how certain activities could be controlled through simple hand movements, and how button arrangement within vehicles could be optimized. "In our MMI project the interdisciplinary factor plays a particularly important role", explains project leader Dr Klaus Bengler. "Apart from two IT specialists and an electrical engineer, our research team also includes a psychologist, who brings a behavioural dimension into our work." This means that the group is able to see how people perceive and use different components within the vehicle, and consequently derive an optimized operation concept. Simultaneously, the technically-oriented team members examine whether and to what extent these psychological findings can be implemented in reality.

There is a certain degree of curiosity, therefore, as to what drivers can expect in terms of new operation concepts in a few years' time. Dr Bengler provided us with a little taster. "How many songs does your MP3 player contain? 5,000, maybe even 10,000 songs. In view of this enormous number, there will no doubt be times when you won't remember the title of one of your favourite songs, but no doubt you can sing it - and therefore find it". -BMW group