Companies in the development of cyber-physical systems are responding to the ever faster changing requirements of their own products by implementing agile methods. Until now, however, there has been a lack of ways to determine the true effects of agile transformation on their own processes to operate them in a targeted manner. This paper presents an impact model that defines factors that can be used to describe process changes and outlines the interdependencies between the individual factors and describes the influence of known agile methods. This allows the benefits of agile methods to be presented transparently and objectively.

Perceived quality refers to customers’ cognitive and emotional responses to a particular design, often also associated with craftsmanship and customer satisfaction. Previous research defined a taxonomy of perceived quality and provided understanding about how engineering design decisions impact customer satisfaction. Furthermore, development of new products is frequently based on carrying over attributes of existing products, either from the same producer or from competitors. Previous research offered a new product development methodology combining variations of subsystems to carry over from existing products. This brief presents how these two lines of research combined to design the central console of the Porsche Panamera automobile and discusses the opportunities and challenges posed in the practical implementation of this research.

Most products are developed in generations. This needs to be considered with regard to development methods and processes to make existing knowledge available to achieve increased efficiency. To realize this, the approach of PGE – product generation engineering – is formulated. Product generation engineering is understood as the development of products based on reference products (precursor or competitor products). The subsystems are either adapted to the new product generation by means of carryover or they are newly developed based on shape variation or principle variation. Validation is considered as the central activity in the product engineering process and is a major challenge, especially for complex mechatronic systems. Therefore, it is important to understand validation as an ongoing activity during product development. The pull principle of validation describes the definition and development of validation activities, including models and validation environments based on specific validation objectives. In order to have effectiveness within validation of subsystems, it is necessary to map the interactions with the overall system, namely the super-system. The relevant subsystems can be connected under consideration of functional and energetic aspects by means of virtual, physical or mixed virtual–physical modeling applied by the holistic IPEK-X-in-the-Loop approach within the integrated Product engineering Model (iPeM).