Bosch Develops a Single

Platform for Automotive Test

Data Analysis and Visualization
– Noticeperiod.com

Industries: Automotive

Application Areas: Data analytics, Test and measurement

Capabilities: Data analysis, Parallel computing, Desktop and web deployment

Products Used: MATLAB, MATLAB Compiler, Parallel Computing Toolbox, Signal

Processing Toolbox

Country: India
Bosch Develops a Single Platform for Automotive Test Data Analysis and
Visualization

Bosch, the world’s largest independent parts supplier to the automotive industry, must
meet various quality requirements for its products. Using test benches, components
undergo functional, endurance, and other testing.

To enable engineers to rapidly and accurately interpret test data from measurement
devices, test benches, and vehicles, Bosch developed ENValyzer (Engineering Test
Data Visualizer and Analyzer), a MATLAB® based tool for analyzing and visualizing
measurement data.

“ENValyzer has reduced the time engineers spend on data analysis and visualization,
improved accuracy, and enabled enhanced visualization of test bench results,” says
Sharath SL, project manager at Bosch India. “MATLAB saved us months of
development time because it had the data importing, signal processing, statistical
analysis, and visualization capabilities we needed built in.”

Challenge

Testing is one of the most critical phases of the engineering product development life
cycle, and it demands enormous time and effort. At Bosch, products are subjected to
various kinds of testing. Engineers must create test scenarios within the limitations of
spreadsheets and other data post processing tools. The resulting measurement data
comes in many formats, which are dictated by data acquisition software, test bench
manufacturers, and other acquisition techniques.

Bosch engineers recognized several drawbacks with using disparate tools. First, the in-
house tools required ongoing maintenance. Second, the amount of data the teams
needed to process was growing beyond the limits of the tools. Third, the results the
tools produced were not accurate enough to enable the engineers to precisely
determine the quality of the component under test; in many cases, the data post
processing software could not be enhanced with new features. Fourth, using the tools to
configure and analyze the data involved numerous manual steps. Bosch wanted to
develop and deploy a single platform for accurately analyzing and visualizing large
amounts of engineering test data from a range of automotive systems.

“MATLAB enabled us to speed the development of ENValyzer, a customizable, easy-to-

use tool for analyzing, visualizing, and interpreting engineering data in a wide variety of
formats. Now, our engineers can validate components faster and more accurately than
was possible with spreadsheets and third-party tools.”

– Sharath SL, Bosch

Solution

The Bosch engineering tools team used MATLAB to develop ENValyzer, a tool that
simplifies analysis without compromising integrity and helps engineers arrive at better
decisions. The team used the object-oriented programming capabilities of the MATLAB
language to simplify ongoing maintenance tasks, including the creation of more than
250 class definition files for the complete application.

ENValyzer uses MATLAB capabilities to read and write measurement data in multiple
formats from test benches, vehicles, and acquisition systems.

Using MATLAB and MATLAB toolboxes, the team added several general-purpose
analysis capabilities to ENValyzer, including functions for regression analysis, curve
fitting, filtering, spectral analysis, data smoothing, and principal component analysis
(PCA) calculations. They also developed MATLAB functions for domain-specific
analysis.

To enable engineers to visualize analysis results in ENValyzer, the team used MATLAB
to add single, secondary, matrix plot, and multiple axis views.

The team added support for generating analysis and visualization reports in PDF,
HTML, and Microsoft PowerPoint® formats that show results in tables and plots. Users
can create and customize reporting templates for various domains.
Once the team had created this initial version of ENValyzer, they used Signal
Processing Toolbox™ functions to add more advanced features for performing Fourier
analysis, removing noise with Chebyshev and Butterworth filters, and applying Savitzky-
Golay smoothing filters.

They used these new features to automate processes frequently performed by test and
validation engineers in specific domains. For the steering group, for example, they
added an ENValyzer function that performs filtering, smoothing, and other signal
processing operations on steering angle, torque, and other measurement channels to
automatically assess the quality of steering gears.

The team added support for running calculations on multiple processor cores
simultaneously using Parallel Computing Toolbox™, enabling engineers to analyze
several data files at once.

Using MATLAB Compiler™, they created a standalone version of ENValyzer that can
be used by test engineers who do not have MATLAB installed.

Bosch is currently using ENValyzer in production, and now offers the tool commercially
to other companies via the MathWorks Connections Program and through other
marketing forums. Bosch engineers in India, Germany, and North American use
ENValyzer to evaluate common rail system and steering system data and to validate
steering gear and fuel-level sensors.

Results

■ Validation times reduced by an average of 40–50%. “MATLAB enabled us to

automate analysis steps in ENValyzer and to analyze several data files at once on
multiple cores,” says Sharath. “With these improvements, our engineers have reduced
validation cycle times by 40–50%.”

■ Three to four months of development time saved. “A key requirement for

ENValyzer was the ability to import data from binary files in various formats,” says
Sathvik Tarikere Sathyanarayana, senior engineer at Bosch India. “We found it easy to
understand the data structure and write the code in MATLAB, and that helped us
complete development in about six months. It would probably have taken us three or
four months longer if we had used another environment for developing the post
processing software.”

■ Analysis accuracy increased. “We were not happy with the accuracy of the results
when we used spreadsheets for data analysis,” says Sharath. “By applying smoothing
filters and various analysis techniques in MATLAB, we have improved accuracy. As a
result, we can use ENValyzer to classify a gear or other component as good or bad
using much smaller tolerances than before.”
Learn more about Bosch: www.bosch.com

Team – Noticeperiod.com