
With the Continental Cooperation Portal, car manufacturers and suppliers save time and money in vehicle development, reduce the effort for all parties involved and increase the quality of the software, Continental advertises. The company wants to offer a solution for the explosively growing share of software that car manufacturers must integrate into future vehicle generations. At the same time, Continental is taking over parts of the system integration and creating the prerequisites for the development of networked vehicles whose electronic architecture is focused on High Performance Computers (HPC) and replaces the classic, distributed ECU architecture.
Due to many manual processes and a lack of standardization, the process leading to integrated software has been extremely time-consuming up to now. After delivery, the applications were tested manually and possible errors were played back, whereupon the process started all over again - a method of working that is neither efficient nor up-to-date in modern vehicles, in which software from up to 50 suppliers is used. The Continental Cooperation Portal automates this ping-pong game with all software suppliers so that only error-free applications are transferred to the actual development system. In addition, the online platform reduces the need for correction loops and frees up capacity for implementing additional ECU functions.