Distributed Simulation and Testing for the Design of a Smart Suspension

In the design of vehicle components, the high dependence and connectivity among the vehicle systems make it necessary to continuously share information about their design status and their effect on the complete vehicle performance. This fact means that very early full system evaluations with the participation of all involved stakeholders are a must. Unfortunately, this need is difficult to fulfill as different development paces exist and not all the designs are available at the same moment and with the same maturity level. This is also the case for the availability of prototypes. In the present article, we introduce a distributed simulation and testing environment capable of linking information among virtual and physical components (e.g., test benches for prototypes and first parts) as a design tool perfectly embedded inside the model-based design methodology. This new design tool and methodology, which is used for the development of a smart suspension, can cope with the limited availability of prototype resources and permits the participation of several R&D teams working at different sites. One of the most important limitations of the distributed simulations and testing is the existing delay among the different nodes, and this issue is remarkably crucial in the case of linking real components with hard real-time requirements like test benches [1]. In the present work, a novel strategy (packetized predictive delay and dropout compensator-PPDDC) is proposed for handling the delays and therefore assuring the consistency of the real-time simulation and allowing a robust and safe test. PPDDC is applied to the testing and simulation platform used for the design of a smart suspension. As the testing and simulation platform is under the implementation phase, the described PPDDC strategy has been validated using numerical simulations.