Five Japanese automobile manufacturers, Subaru, Toyota, Nissan Motor, Honda and Mazda plus five parts manufacturers (Aisin, Jatco, Denso, Panasonic and Mitsubishi Electric, have become executive members of the Japan Automotive Model Based Engineering centre (JAMBE), which went public today.

The new organisation will promote Model Based Development (MBD) across Japan’s automotive industry.

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The centre was founded to fulfill the purpose of creating the most-advanced development community in the mobility sector.

Primarily consisting of private companies, the centre succeeds an initiative led by Japan’s Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry called Enrichment of Suriawase 2.0 — an industry-academia-government and strategic future policy for MBD in the automobile industry — which had been compiled as a result of discussions conducted by the Study Group for Ideal Approaches to Model Utilization in the Automobile Industry.

Executive member companies will lead the centre’s activities to contribute to making Japan’s automotive industry more competitive internationally by enabling academia and businesses to share digital models across the board, linking academic research with development of parts, systems and vehicles.

This allows both sides to coordinate and make adjustments (Suriawase in Japanese) digitally from the initial stages of development.

Chairman of the steering committee is Mitsuo Hitomi (senior innovation fellow, Mazda and the operation cost is about JPY60m a year.

Model based development uses virtual models on a computer, not using actual prototype parts throughout design and development activities to realise efficient development activities by saving considerable time and effort that would usually be spent elaborating performance concepts, designing, making prototype parts, and testing, the organisation said.

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