Real-Time Simulations on Small Multi-Computer Systems in Automotive Engineering

For the development of electronic control units in modern automotive vehicles, real-time simulations have become an important tool. Using simulators for rapid control prototyping reduces the development time significantly. Testing electronic devices with hardware-in-the-loop simulators replaces many time consuming and expensive experiments.

The computational performance needed for real-time simulations in vehicle dynamics may be achieved by parallel computer systems. As it is shown in this paper, multi-computer systems are particularly well suited for real-time simulations in vehicle dynamics and provide an inexpensive solution to the required hardware needs. The advantages of the multi-computer-based approach are presented and the scaleability of the system, due to the modularity of the simulator is shown. The parallelism of the simulator involves certain drawbacks which are discussed as well.