REQUIREMENTS ON SIMULATION SOFTWARE FOR AUTOMOTIVE INDUSTRY APPLICATIONS

Abstract Simulation software available today for mechanical, hydraulic, electric and electronic systems does not allow the integrated simulation of a mechatronic system as it is found in today’s automobiles. Therefore, a group of simulation experts from german automobile companies joined for activities aimed at improving this situation. The first problem dealed with was to identify the possible architectures of open simulation environments capable to integrate models of different physical domains. Apart from the classic way of combining models on a symbolic equation level, the concept of simulator coupling via process communication was studied. The second problem identified was the lack of a suitable data model for mechatronic systems, leading to a conglomerate of incompatible proprietary data models from software vendors. This situation is a serious barrier to system integration and implementation of simultaneous engineering concepts. As a solution from this situation, a project is beeing promoted which will hopefully deliver a data model for mechatronic systems in the course of three years. The data model will be developed based on the STEP-methodology and will be launched as a proposal for a new application protocol to ISO standardization.