Nowadays, only around a third of the value added can be attributed to mechanical components. The other disciplines have taken the lead at an astonishing speed. It is generally accepted that the trend today is towards what has been dubbed "electromobility", and the importance of the vehicle electric will undoubtedly grow over the coming years. No less than 70 internetworked control units, three kilometers of wiring harness and some 700 electrically implemented functions – that was how the state of the art was described back in 2007. Control units that communicate with each other over wiring harnesses several kilometers in length already deliver a large proportion of the functionality of cars, and in this respect, the car differs little from the products in the aerospace industry. A common basis is urgently required for describing the logic of the circuits, the technical implementation of these circuits using individual components and connections and the function of the overall system. This will ultimately result in a functional model that extends the digital mock-up – which is currently almost exclusively geometrical in nature – to incorporate these aspects.