HIGH PERFORMANCE COMPUTING FRAMEWORK FOR CO-SIMULATION OF VEHICLE–TERRAIN INTERACTION

Current modeling and simulation capabilities permit tackling complex multi-physics problems, such as those encountered in ground vehicle mobility studies, using high-fidelity physics-based models for all involved subsystems, including the vehicle, tires, and deformable terrain. However, these come at significant computational burden; research and development on new software architecture and parallelization techniques is crucial in enabling such predictive simulation capabilities to be useful in design of new vehicles or in operational settings.

In this paper, we describe the architecture, philosophy, and implementation of a distributed message-passing-based granular terrain simulation capability and its incorporation into an explicit force–displacement co-simulation framework to enable effective simulation of multi-physics mobility problems. We demonstrate that the proposed infrastructure has good parallel scaling characteristics and can thus effectively leverage available computing resources. Furthermore, we show that the outer communication layer, also implemented with a message passing approach, is effective and adds negligible overhead.