Development of a vehicle simulator based on a real car for research and education purposes

The chapter presents a hardware-in-the-loop simulation environment, which is built in such a way that the simulator tends to the real vehicle functions as much as possible. The simulation system contains several components such as an Human Machine Interface (HMI), a high-accuracy validated simulation software operated on a PC and a visual system with real-time graphics. The simulator is equally suitable for educational and research purposes. All the vehicle engineer students use the simulator system during their curriculum, enabling the thorough understanding of modern vehicle functions, thus improving the competence of future generations of engineers. Moreover, the simulator system projects ahead the opportunity of new vehicle research that induces considerable additional scientific results.