New technical standards for vehicle materials: parson supports ASAM with technical writing and publication pipeline
parson supported the standardization organization ASAM e.V. in the development and publication of the new technical standard, ASAM OpenMATERIAL® 3D. The project aimed to describe material properties for the consistent simulation of physical objects. While the participating companies created the content, parson contributed with technical writing expertise, performed linguistic editing, created visualizations, and implemented an automated publication process via a pipeline.
ASAM OpenMATERIAL® 3D: The new industry standard for material properties in the automotive industry
Accurate simulation of vehicles and their material properties is crucial for the automotive industry. Precisely replicating these properties in driving simulators can significantly reduce development time and accelerate the creation of new materials. This requires a unified industry standard that enables the reliable exchange of material data between different tools.
Experts from leading automotive and software companies, such as BMW and Persival, authored the content of the ASAM OpenMATERIAL® 3D standard. parson supported the project with technical writing services.
Our service: Technical writing for the technical standard
parson supported the ASAM expert group in the following ways:
- Set up the working environment on the collaboration platform GitHub as basis for cross-location teamwork
- Built and continuously maintained the publication pipeline using Antora, enabling automated HTML documentation from content
- Structured the documentation and coordinated the thematic outline
- Integrated input from the expert group into the standard’s documentation
- Standardized the documentation in terms of language, style, terminology, and consistency based on the ASAM Editorial Guide
- Created graphics in the ASAM layout, following the applicable style guide (colors, shapes, style)
- Provided technical writing and technical support to authors working with AsciiDoc in Visual Studio Code
- Continuously maintained the Antora framework and pipeline and implemented new requirements
Examples from the ASAM OpenMATERIAL® 3D techical standard
1) Visualization created by parson:
2) A topic in the AsciiDoc source format including various markup elements:== Grp_Environment_Objects Environment objects include buildings, vegetation, and any other (stationary) objects in the environment. An environment object causes a local elevation or other addition to the terrain. Grp_Environment_Objects is used as parent for all environment objects in an environment. It shares the coordinate system with Grp_Root, see <<tab-Environment-Grp-Root>>. [#fig-environment-objects] Grp_Environment_Objects image::Grp_Environment_Objects.svg[,600]
3) The same topic rendered in HTML in Antora:
Timely and successful release of the new ASAM OpenMATERIAL®
ASAM released the new standard ASAM OpenMATERIAL® 3D on schedule on April 3, 2025, meeting the targeted quality.
Outlook
Following the release, tool providers will start implementing the technical standards. At the same time, ASAM is gathering feedback and change requests for version 2.0.
About ASAM e.V.
ASAM (Association for Standardization of Automation and Measuring Systems) is a consortium that promotes the standardization of development and test systems in the automotive industry. Members include automobile manufacturers, automotive suppliers, software producers, engineering service providers and research institutes in the automotive sector.