ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT: The ever-increasing competitive automotive market has stimulated manufacturers to develop vehicles that have to excel in terms of safety, design, sustainability and driving pleasure. It is therefore imperative for manufacturers to adopt sophisticated development processes and a well laid-out product lifecycle management plan to ensure their seamless presence in the market. Full exploitation of simulation and computer-aided engineering (CAE) tools can enable quick evaluation of different vehicle concepts, reducing the need of physical testing on development prototypes, facilitating comprehensive software (SW) verification. Addressing the aforementioned statements this paper presents the Virtual Brake Release (VBR) method; the end-result of the VBR method is SW release of the brake control module (BCM) for safe driving of the physical vehicle. To enable the VBR a chassis model-in-the-loop (MIL) of the target vehicle is integrated together with software-in-the-loop (SIL) models of the chassis control actuators that influence the vehicle dynamics (e.g. steering, powertrain-driveline and active suspension) and interact with the BCM. The validated chassis and SIL/MIL models are integrated into a verified virtual-vehicle test-environment (VVTE) in Matlab/Simulink with IPG/Maker emulating the vehicle’s dynamics; the BCM is either simulated as SIL or integrated as hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) to a real time computer executing the VVTE. The VVTE is subjected to a structured set of tests to verify its function, performance and robustness; those tests constitute a hyper-class of the tests that physical testing would allow, thus enabling exhaustive verification of the SW.
