Real-time Simulation of a Vehicle Door Locking Mechanism on a Hardware-in-the-Loop Platform

An automotive side door latch release mechanism has been modelled for the locking and unlocking vehicle functionality in Dymola. The performance of the developed door lock model is evaluated against an existing model of a similar door locking/unlocking system in Stateflow. The model performance is also compared with measurements from a real vehicle door latch. The model is converted into a Simulink model and built for a real-time environment such as the dSPACE target with a fixed step size solver. It is shown that a step size as small as 1 ms can be used for real-time simulation without task overrunning in the real-time target. The model is also benchmarked on a multiprocessor setup as multiprocessor simulators are common in system-level networked Electronic Controller Unit (ECU) testing facilities for implementing high fidelity closed loop models of integrated ECUs and actuators. It is proven that the developed door lock model in Dymola can be built and executed on a multiprocessor platform and there is much potential on the use of such models for future work in ECU testing.