The Standardization Strategy Board (SSB) is a project initiated by the German Association of the Automotive Industry (VDA) and carried out by the prostep ivip Association. The SSB project group was set up in 2017 with the aim of enabling future cross-company systems engineering, i.e. collaborative systems engineering(CSE), on the basis of engineering IT standards. To do this, the prostep ivip Association is for the first time analyzing, prioritizing and evaluating the maturity of the IT standards relevant to systems engineering in order to derive common strategies and recommendations for their use and implementation. The objective is to achieve end-to-end coverage of the business objects and interfaces needed in the CSE process on the basis of these engineering IT standards.
The motivating factors behind the need to establish engineering IT standards are obvious. On the one hand, the complexity of the products and their level of interdisciplinarity are increasing dramatically. Systems engineering is being used to a growing extent, and working according to the V-model is becoming more and more common. On the other hand, digitalization requires greater collaboration between different companies that benefit from the digital value chain.