PAVEWAY co-research project tackles one of industry’s costliest development challenges
When problems surface late in the development of a complex industrial product, the damage rarely stops at the drawing board. Delays grow, redesigns spread, and decisions that should have been settled early become expensive to reverse. PAVEWAY is built around that pressure point, with the aim of helping companies define, validate and refine complex systems before late-stage changes begin to drive cost and uncertainty.
PAVEWAY is a three-year co-research project bringing together four universities and five company partners to improve how complex products are developed across maritime, power generation and industrial automation. Running from January 2026 to December 2028, the consortium includes the University of Oulu, the University of Vaasa, Tampere University and LUT University, together with Wärtsilä Finland Oy, ABB Oy, Meyer Turku Oy, Dassault Systemes Oy and Nokia Oyj. The project has a total budget of 2.5 million euros.
The project focuses on a challenge that is becoming harder to ignore: industrial systems are growing more complex just as sustainability demands, new fuels and global regulatory pressures are reshaping the conditions for product development. PAVEWAY’s answer is to bring requirement management, modelling and early validation into a more coherent development flow, so that risks can be detected earlier and decisions made on a stronger basis. In Juho Könnö’s words, “PAVEWAY aims to shift complex system development toward a connected, model-based process where requirements, architecture and validation are linked from the earliest stages.”
That early shift is closely tied to the project’s emphasis on virtual validation. As Dominik Walica notes, “Early virtual validation saves resources by catching issues before they become costly, enabling faster design iteration, and reducing the number of required physical prototypes.”
At the core of PAVEWAY is the use of model-based systems engineering and simulation to bring validation into the earliest stages of development. For Juho Könnö, the practical value is equally clear: “Earlier risk detection and better traceability help companies reduce rework, avoid costly late-stage changes and make development decisions with greater confidence.”
From there, the project unfolds through four connected strands of work. One focuses on building a cross-domain requirement traceability framework that maps customer expectations and technical constraints across different disciplines. Another develops a configurable simulation environment that supports early-stage validation through virtual prototyping. A third concentrates on product portfolio development, evaluating market feasibility and aligning design solutions with emerging demands around decarbonization and digital integration. The fourth connects the work to wider industrial ecosystems and dissemination. Together, these strands are designed to address barriers in early-stage requirement management, cross-domain integration and scalable validation.
The project is grounded in practical industrial use cases, including modular hydrogen production systems, portfolio decision support for product owners, and the validation of new sustainable technologies in shipbuilding. Across these areas, PAVEWAY is designed to give companies a more structured route from customer needs and system requirements to validated design decisions by combining requirement traceability, simulation-driven validation and portfolio-level development. Looking at the project’s impact over time, Emil Kurvinen highlights both the immediate and longer-term potential: “In the near term, PAVEWAY can improve virtual validation and requirement management practices. In the longer run, it can enable faster, more reliable and more reusable product development.”
That broader significance extends beyond development practices alone. As Emil Kurvinen puts it, “PAVEWAY can strengthen Finnish industry by helping companies develop sustainable, export-ready technologies faster and with lower development risk.”
At its core, the project is built around a simple industrial need with far-reaching consequences: better decisions made earlier. When that happens, products can be developed with stronger traceability, greater confidence and less exposure to the costly disruptions that tend to follow when problems are discovered too late.