Abstract
According to interviews with experts from OEMs, suppliers as well as Start-Ups in Germany and in China, one of the main changes in automotive development is the entry of new disciplines and stakeholders from different disciplines in automotive industry. This leads to more and closer cooperation between company departments at different locations, for example between OEMs and globally distributed suppliers. In addition location-dependent influencing factors have an increasing significance due to different driver types and environmental situations for applications and development which have to be considered focusing the target market. Consequent to these trends appropriate modifications to existing development methods especially validation methods in automotive industry are required.
For supporting the automotive development in the future environment like mentioned above, the IPEK - Institute of Product Engineering at Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) – has developed and implemented a new validation concept for globally distributed product development based on its X-in-the-Loop-Framework. The XiL-Framework represents a holistic and integrated validation framework. “X” is the substitution for the system under development (SUD), which is validated under consideration of the influences from the rest system, driver and environmental situation. The new validation concept is characterized by a “distance loop”, which means the SUD and other elements e.g. environment-, user-models or the rest-system can be located elsewhere. In this case a remote but real-time configurable validation can be realized without relocating the SUD or any other element of the XiL-framework, additionally the SUD can be validated in any environmental situation and under control of any user.
The advantages of the new validation concept have been demonstrated in this paper with a concrete application example of e-motor validation based on a cooperation project in the course of the Sino-German Network on Electromobility. The e-motor was investigated on a remote test bench and connected via internet with the rest-vehicle-system and the system environment as well as the system driver.
The main restriction of this new validation concept is the data transfer quality. With the rapid development of information technology, the X-in-the-Distance-Loop concept would be more and widely applicable. In further research work, ways to handle the delay have to be developed, since the data transfer is always attended to a certain time lag. It has to be researched, which transfer delay is admissible for a certain validation setup and possibilities to minimize the delay as well as the optimal soft- and hardware structure have to be investigated. In comparison to the classic Hardware-in-the-Loop validation approach and the IPEK XiL-Framework the new validation concept enables the remote joint validation even if the elements of the validation framework are globally distributed and also facilitates the collaborative development between OEMs, suppliers and research institutes since the confidential vehicle models do not need to be released.
In this article a new validation concept based on the IPEK XiL-Framework has been introduced and proved by a concrete application. This new validation concept saves time and costs of cooperation between globally distributed departments and appropriately facilitates the multidisciplinary product development, which requires naturally very much cooperation between departments from different disciplines. With this new validation concept the location-dependent characters of each target market can be considered in the early phase of development efficiently and simple test benches can be upgraded by connecting with other influencing factors.
KEYWORDS – automotive development, electric vehicle, multidisciplinary product development, validation, X-in-the-Distance-Loop