Increasing All-Wheel-Drive System Calibration Efficiency through Hardware-in-the-Loop Simulation Techniques

All-wheel-drive system calibration has traditionally been a time-intensive task requiring substantial staff and vehicle resources. With vehicle developments constantly evolving and typically shortening in duration, using hardware-in-the-loop simulation (HILS) for data calibration will become crucial to ensure accurate results with available staff and vehicle resources. By introducing HILS into the calibration process, external signals can be modeled in the system and used as calculation tools to solve for calibration parameters that historically had to be tuned by hand this increases the efficiency of a calibration engineer's work.

Using the HILS method to calculate calibration data for an all-wheel-drive (AWD) electronic control unit (ECU) provides highly accurate results in a reduced amount of time compared to previous data calibration method. Incorporating the HILS method into the calibration process has cut the time of certain data setting techniques by 80%. Such resource savings has a direct impact on vehicle development by reducing the required number of test vehicles and test course hours.