Structuring Automotive Data for Systems Engineering: A Taxonomy-Based Approach

Vehicle data is essential for advancing data-driven development throughout the automotive lifecycle, including requirements engineering, design, verification, and validation, and post-deployment optimization. Developers currently collect data in a decentralized and fragmented manner across simulations, test benches, and real-world driving, resulting in data silos, inconsistent formats, and limited interoperability. This leads to redundant efforts, inefficient integration, and suboptimal use of data. This fragmentation results in data silos, inconsistent storage structures, and limited interoperability, leading to redundant data collection, inefficient integration, and suboptimal application. To address these challenges, this article presents a structured literature review and develops an inductive taxonomy for automotive data. This taxonomy categorizes data according to its sources and applications, improving data accessibility and utilization. The analysis reveals a growing emphasis on real-world driving and machine learning applications while highlighting a critical gap in data availability for requirements engineering. By providing a systematic framework for structuring automotive data, this research contributes to more efficient data management and improved decision-making in the automotive industry.