Blending Methodologies @UniBO

Stefano Ballesio (Addfor) and Claudio Ricci (Danisi Engineering) held a seminar at University of Bologna, Advanced Electronic Vehicle Engineering, Professor Cecilia Metra, describing a new method to merge together the typical offline simulations, track data measurements, control system design and artificial intelligence, with the aid of the VI-Grade Di M150 dynamic driving simulator in the loop.
Showing applications to chassis control system racing from lane keeping to traction control for high performance cars.

The design of most subsystems of a vehicle are becoming more and more critical, because of the timing for the modern projects. The subsystem related to the active chassis control belongs to that basket and their design and refinement is becoming even more critical with the new non-traditional powertrain architectures. In such applications, indeed, the integration of all the vehicle subsystems increases its complexity.
The presentation shows a new method to merge together the typical offline simulation with track data measurement and prevision of the expected performance of new components design done by a DiM150 dynamic driving simulator.

In particular, the presentation shows an overview of the handling experimental characterization of a car, focused on the simulation model validation and their merge with Hardware in the loop and software in the loop applications.

Some examples of chassis active control system, developed and tested using a combination of track testing, advanced driver simulators and software in the loop techniques are reported. The need for correlating subjective and objectives evaluations in the vehicle dynamics controls development, make it a good candidate for the application of this hybrid approach, granting an affordable, reliable, repeatable and safe environment to work on. Moreover, the use of driving simulators can assure the introduction of human factors into development loop in the earlier design phases.