Virtual Safeguarding of Chassis Functions by Evaluating Driving Behaviour

The approval of highly automated (HAD) vehicles and modern advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) requires extensive tests in order to guarantee safety and driving comfort in all driving situations. Adjustments of the vehicle settings that result from such tests during an ongoing approval process are associated with great effort. Changes and developments at the controller and actuator level in this phase are therefore more difficult or even require a restart of the whole test phase.

With the aim of overcoming this obstacle in the area of chassis development, a tool for driving behavior-based safeguarding has been developed at TWT GmbH. The tool deployment itself was in close cooperation with and for our customers from the automotive industry. On the basis of numerical simulations, this development enables to detect the mutual influences of a component adjustment on the behavior of the entire vehicle. For this purpose, the three vehicle levels – tactical, controller and actuator – are considered separately and interfaces between the levels are precisely defined. A limited set of evaluation parameters and test scenarios can be derived, which enable simulation-based safeguarding for changes to the chassis controllers and actuators. The decisive factor in this approach is that the assessment of interactions does not take place on the microscopic scale of signal and effect chains, but is derived from the macroscopic domain of driving behavior.