Abstract
Assessing passenger cars’ dynamic performance is a critical aspect for car industries, due to its impact on the overall vehicle safety evaluation and the subjective nature of the involved handling and comfort metrics. Accordingly, ISO standards, such as ISO 4138 and ISO 3888, define several specific driving tests to assess vehicle dynamics performance objectively. Consequently, proper evaluation of the dynamic behaviour requires measuring several physical quantities, including accelerations, speed, and linear and angular displacements obtained after instrumenting a vehicle with multiple sensors. This experimental activity is highly demanding in terms of hardware costs, and it is also significantly time-consuming. Several approaches can be considered for reducing vehicle development time. In particular, simulation software can be exploited to predict the approximate behaviour of a vehicle using virtual scenarios. Moreover, motion platforms and detail-scalable numerical vehicle models are widely implemented for the purpose. This paper focuses on a customized simulation environment developed in C++, which exploits the advantages of object-oriented programming. The presented framework strives to perform concurrent simulations of vehicles with different characteristics such as mass, tyres, engine, suspension, and transmission systems. Within the proposed simulation framework, we adopted a hierarchical and modular representation. Vehicles are modelled by a 14 degree-of-freedom (DOF) full-vehicle model, capable of capturing the dynamics and complemented by a set of scalable-detail models for the remaining sub-systems such as tyre, engine, and steering system. Furthermore, this paper proposes the usage of autonomous virtual drivers for a more objective evaluation of vehicle dynamic performances. Moreover, to further evaluate our simulator architecture’s efficiency and assess the achieved level of concurrency, we designed a benchmark able to analyse the scaling of the performances with respect to the number of different vehicles during the same simulation. Finally, the paper reports the proposed simulation environment’s scalability resulting from a set of different and varying driving scenarios.
Highlights
All results presented have been achieved through simulations executed on a workstation featuring an Intel®
Afterwards, we demonstrated the potential of the platform and the presented virtual driver approach by simulating a set of comparative standard driving tests, which are typically adopted for performing vehicle dynamics objective evaluations on test tracks
Vehicle 1 was supposed to be equipped with a simplified mechanical differential, providing an even torque distribution to the driving wheels
Summary
Automotive original equipment manufacturers (OEM) aimed to make their cars increasingly smarter, more autonomous, and safer by widening the use of efficient electronic control units (ECUs) and active systems to improve both vehicle performance and passengers’ safety. Besides the older longitudinal dynamics controllers, such as the ABS [4], the adaptive cruise control (ACC) [5], and the traction control system (TCS) [6,7,8,9], other functionalities recently arose targeting the lateral stability enhancement, such as the electronic stability program (ESP) [10,11], the active front steering (AFS) [12,13,14] and the direct yaw moment controller (DYC) for torque vectoring (TV) transmission control [15]. The complexity of modern vehicle control systems is reaching hardly sustainable levels, with up to over 100 million lines of source code distributed on board among over 100 ECUs [18]
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