TABLE OF CONTENTS The last few years have seen scientific and technical competition within the automobile industry become increasingly intense. Because of this it is important for individual manufacturers to ensure that new designs are brought to the market as quickly as possible. In the future it must be possible to carry out the design of a new model, from conception to production, in as little as eighteen months.
These days the equipment within a motor vehicle includes a myriad of electrical and electronic subsystems. Many of these subsystems serve to improve driving comfort, i.e. electric windows, air conditioning systems etc. On top of this there are safety-relevant vehicle subsystems, such as drive dynamics control and anti-lock brake systems.
An ever decreasing design effort for such systems, coupled with increasing amounts of equipment, is only possible due to the far-reaching use of computer simulations in the design of new vehicles. The aim of computer models, such as the one shown schematically in Figure 8.1 is to reveal, as early as possible in the design phase, the effect on the dynamic behavior of the vehicle of new components operating in conjunction with the existing subsystems. With such an approach the effect of a new component can be analyzed in the definition phase, long before the prototype is complete.
To date, modeling efforts have concentrated on reproducing as exactly as possible the behavior of individual components. This approach has yielded, for example, exact descriptions of the...
