Development of a Mass-Customizable Medium-Duty Vocational Commercial Vehicle Using Multibody Dynamics

The development of commercial vehicles demand a rigorous and relatively expedient integration and validation to be performed in order to have the vehicle delivered to a satisfied customer. In today's market, the end customer often request for vehicles with various customizations and requirements for vocational performance, such as load and fuel economy. These requirements often run into conflict with vehicle dynamics fundamentals such as ride and handling. Examples of such concern are vocation bodies that do not have weight distributed unevenly or even ones that bias the static load distribution of the vehicle such that ride and handling are affected because of change in bounce, roll and pitch natural frequencies. One tool that can be used to develop and evaluate vehicle response to provide guidance for production vehicles is multibody dynamics. Unlike the passenger car industry, no two trucks rolling down the assembly line are necessarily the same. Hence, the key to mass-customization is early validation and developing preemptive solutions to potential risks to vehicle dynamics, NVH and durability. In today's complex commercial vehicles, it is imperative that the system is evaluated proactively to ensure that a safe and durable vehicle is delivered to the customer. This paper will provide a glimpse of how multibody dynamics simulation can be applied to develop a mass-customizable medium-duty vocational commercial vehicle.