In recent years, the automotive industry has faced increasing pressure to accelerate development cycles and reduce costs. Simultaneously, ride comfort standards have risen due to the ongoing integration of autonomous driving functionalities. Consequently, it has become essential to ensure that ride comfort attains a high degree of maturity at the very early stages of the automotive development process. This necessitates the establishment of objective criteria that enable the reliable estimation of subjective ride comfort, utilizing simulation-based assessment methods.
This study introduces a methodological framework designed to systematically translate the manufacturer specific subjective perception and assessment of ride comfort into objective descriptions using a dynamic driving simulator. The framework is conceived as a generic approach, enabling the comprehensive application to a wide spectrum of subjective ride comfort phenomena, while being specifically optimized for the challenges of the automotive industry. Employing this framework facilitates the derivation of highly detailed, objective descriptions of subjective ride comfort evaluations, which promotes the achievement of advanced ride comfort maturity for new vehicles in early development phases and supports the overall enhancement of ride comfort.
The exemplary application of the framework to a transient, one-dimensional ride comfort phenomenon demonstrates its capability to derive robust objective models from subjective evaluations conducted with professional test drivers in a dynamic driving simulator environment.