Asset Manager
Asset Manager is the central hub for defining, organizing, and understanding the assets that make up your product architecture — vehicles, ECUs, features, and software components. It provides a structured, AI-assisted environment where engineers can build and maintain a living bill of materials, with properties, relationships, and context that the platform continuously curates on your behalf.
Core Concepts
Assets
An Asset represents any entity in your product architecture — a vehicle, an ECU, a feature, a software component, a network interface, or any other node in your system. Assets are organized into a hierarchy: a parent asset can have many child assets, and descendants automatically inherit context from their ancestors. An asset can only be linked under a parent whose type is a direct parent type of its own type — see Asset Types → Type Hierarchy.
Hierarchies are managed through the Links tab on any asset detail page and visualized in the Tree View.
Asset Types
Asset Types define the schema for a class of assets. VSEC ships with three built-in types — Vehicle, Feature, and Component — and you can create your own custom types, organized in a hierarchy (e.g. a “Gateway ECU” type under “Component”). Each type can carry a configurable set of properties — scalar values, single-select enumerations, and multi-select tags. See Asset Types for full details.
Properties
Properties are structured metadata fields attached to assets via their type, such as Product Owner, Keywords, or Interfaces. VSEC includes a set of default properties and lets you define your own with custom data types. They are also the primary target of AI-generated suggestions: the curation engine proposes values for every property on a type, which you can accept or discard row-by-row. See Asset Properties for full details.
Asset Relationships (Links)
Assets can be linked to one another to express relationships such as “contains”, “depends on”, or “communicates with”. Relationship links are not a property type; they are managed on each asset’s Links tab. The curation engine also suggests links to existing assets in your workspace when it finds evidence of a relationship in the asset’s context corpus.
Enrichment
Asset Manager includes an AI-powered enrichment system that can automatically generate asset structures and fill in property values from just a name and type, or from attached documents. See Enrichment for how generation and context-based curation work together.
Context
The Context tab on every asset is where you feed information to the AI curation engine — through free-text notes, uploaded documents, and Context Requests from people outside your workspace. The engine reads this corpus and returns a living Understanding document alongside structured suggestions for properties, links, link removals, and child assets. See Asset Context Curation for a full walkthrough.
Intelligence Providers
AI-powered features are driven by the workspace’s active intelligence provider. Claude and Gemini are available as bring-your-own-key providers, configured by a workspace admin under Settings → Intelligence; Deep Harbor is temporarily unavailable. See Intelligence Settings for configuration.
How Asset Manager Fits into VSEC
Asset Manager is not a standalone inventory tool — assets are referenced throughout the platform:
- Risk Manager links security risks to assets and uses Product Owner for default risk assignment.
- VSEC Test associates test runs with specific assets.
- Keywords on assets drive relevance matching for threat intelligence.
- Integrations (e.g. xZETA firmware) can be linked directly to components for SBOM scanning.