Case Study: CEVT Cuts In-Vehicle Network Design Time 50% with Capital Networks

Customer

China Euro Vehicle Technology AB (CEVT) — an automotive development center for the Geely Group, headquartered in Gothenburg, Sweden, specializing in modular vehicle development for brands including Lynk & Co.

Challenges

• Rising complexity driven by autonomous driving and advanced driver-assist (ADAS) functionality requirements
• Development cycle length in tension with market speed demands
• Managing 15,000+ vehicle signals across multiple system variants
• Global collaboration friction between Swedish and Chinese engineering teams
• Need for safety-critical messaging and real-time system reliability guarantees

Solution

CEVT combined two tools in a model-based systems engineering approach:

• Capital Networks (Siemens) — in-vehicle network design and analysis
• SystemWeaver (Systemite AB) — information management and requirements traceability

The toolchain follows the AUTOSAR standard, enabling automated design processes with end-to-end timing requirement validation from sensors to actuators.

Capabilities used

• Single-click visualization of signal publishers, gateways, and subscribers
• Timing margin calculations and network capacity/busload assessments
• Frame packing analysis
• Full traceability from vehicle-level requirements through to implementation
• Variant consistency verification across 50+ electrical system configurations

Quantified results

Metric	Result
Design/verification time	50% reduction (9–12 weeks → 6–8 weeks)
Signal database integration cycle	44% faster (9 weeks → 5 weeks)
Issue detection timing	Design problems caught before supplier involvement

Practical lessons

• Cross-cultural collaboration: the tooling explicitly helped bridge a real organizational friction point — Swedish "precision-first" vs. Chinese "speed-first" engineering styles. Jeremy Parker, Operations Manager, is quoted: "Capital Networks gives us the best of both worlds: correct design but with flexibility to make changes."
• Centralized information governance was cited as critical for distributed teams — generating reliable specs for suppliers and catching inconsistencies upstream (in design) rather than downstream (in costly late-stage testing).
• Organizational impact: the tooling shifted engineering effort away from manual documentation and toward higher-value differentiation work, while enabling better cross-entity knowledge reuse within the larger Geely group.