A Vehicle Simulator for an Efficient Electronic and Electrical Architecture Design

The boom in the number of active safety functions and driver assistance systems during the last several years has made vehicle design more and more difficult. To support the early development process, particularly the design of electronic and electric architectures, the capability to simulate and compute complete vehicle behavior is critically important and useful. This paper presents such a simulator, which consists of key components such as the drivetrain and controller subsystems. Then, after having presented the generic structure of a driver assistance system, concrete use cases of this simulator are given, which assess vehicle performance according to different functional and hardware architectures.