Requirements for a MDE System to Support Collaborative In-Car Communication Diagnostics

Modern automobiles come with a high degree of electronics and an enormous amount of in-car communication activities. This leads to an increasingly complex data volume which challenges automotive engineers in detecting and analyzing erroneous communication processes. In this paper, we present results of our studies on current working behaviour and environments of analysis and diagnosis experts in the automotive industry. While we found a sufficient hardware and software support in single user environments, co-located collaborative environments lack specific software to support collaboration. In particular, we observed a need for support of multiple devices in collaborative multiple display environments (MDEs). After a detailed user analysis and evaluation we present system requirements for information analysis applications in MDEs as required for the analysis of in-car communication activities.