Simulation of Customer Usage: RENAULT’s Approach for Electric Powertrains

Simulation of Customer Usage is fully integrated in the design and validation process of RENAULT Powertrains. Application of Customer Usage Simulation to Electric Powertrains brings new challenges enhanced by rapidly changing technologies. New customer usage scenarios, for instance vehicle charging, need to be considered. The technological content of e-powertrain components is becoming more and more complex, increasing complexity of numerical simulation models. Consequently, the trade-off between simulation time and accuracy becomes critical.

This paper addresses RENAULT’s approach to tackle these issues on electric vehicles currently in development. Some examples of recent customer usage simulation results are presented and discussed. Some of the future planned evolutions are discussed: numerical simulation models must be reduced while keeping the right accuracy level; collected data from connected vehicles will soon be fully integrated as inputs to the simulation. Regarding the simulation time, massive parallel computations can now be implemented. Finally, it is necessary to keep technology intelligence active in all fields of interest for customer usage simulation activities.