The development of vehicles and vehicle sub-systems is a complex task and requires the pooling of expertise from many different domains of science and technology and tight collaborations between different entities, part of a wide and tiered supply chain. Market forces require a constant reduction of time-to-market. Consumers and legislators require a continuous reduction of cost and energy consumption, coupled with improvements in safety and comfort. These forces require a more efficient development process, and an increased virtualisation is providing a number of tools: modelling and simulation are two of these tools. Today, simulation (“Virtual testing”) has earned its place in the automotive development process as a valuable complement to performing physical tests. Physical tests are time-consuming, costly and often of limited use in the early stages of product development when hardware representative of design intent is not available. Developments in the past 10 years have made simulation a usable methodology.
Currently, within the automotive product development cycle virtual and heterogeneous testing is becoming increasingly established through component, module and vehicle-level simulation and Hardware-in-the-Loop test-beds, enabled by ever increasing computing power and communications bandwidth available.
Though a number of standards in this field have been established (FMI, ASAM XiL API), models are still mostly created in a fragmented manner: using domain-specific tools to create, manage and execute simulations without standardisation of the content of the functional interfaces (FMI does standardise the format) and limited scalability. This fragmentation leads to a lot of redundant effort as models of the same component or system are re-created several times.
The HIFI-ELEMENTS project, funded by the Horizon 2020, is addressing this fragmentation through two main mechanisms that include:
a) The development, validatation and publication of a recommendation for standardisation of model interfaces for common e-drive components (e-machine, inverter, battery, DC/DC converter, thermal management system) and implementation of compliant versions of existing models.
b) The implementation of a seamless workflow linking extended versions of existing tools — a model/data management tool and a co-simulation tool for MiL and HiL environments — augmented with effort-saving automated methods for model parameterisation and test case generation.
HIFI-ELEMENTS is proposing solutions that can overcome the current remaining limitations and by the end of the project it will showcase how fragmentation can be reduced and existing tools can be used more efficiently to improve scalability, modularity and real-time use of simulations for system characterisation, optimisation and validation and thus, enable faster introduction of novel e-drive technologies to the market.
As the Project Officer on behalf of the European Commission for the HIFI-ELEMENTS project, it is my great pleasure to say that this project is progressing very well, with high quality results and deliverables, and all expectations are met with great success thanks to the great collaboration of this strong consortium.
Dr Marina Kousoulidou
EC Project Officer
Dr Marina Kousoulidou
EC Project Officer
