OEMs these days are focusing on front loading the activities to Virtual Test Environment (VTE) based development owing to high development cost and complexity in achieving repeatability during testing phase of vehicle development,. This process not only helps in reducing the cost and time but also helps in increasing the maturity and confidence level of the developed system before actual prototype is built.
In the past, extensive research has happened for increasing the fidelity of VTE by improving plant model efficacy which involves powertrain and other vehicle systems. On the other hand, improving the precision of driver model which is one of the most complex nonlinear systems of virtual environment still remains a challenge. It is apparent that various drivers show different behavior in real world for a given drive profile. While modelling a driver for a VTE, the real world driver attributes are seldom considered. In conventional methods, derivation of some of the most essential driver outputs which are used to classify drivers are based on pre-defined logic and hence does not depict actual drive behavior.
This paper intends to provide a novel solution to understand drive behavior of a real world driver and model the same for VTE. Also, impact of various drivers’ behavior on fuel economy and performance for a real world drive cycle will be a part of the study.