A Modular Technique for Automotive System Simulation

Increasingly challenging requirements such as environmental and safety legislation as well as increasing development costs are leading to a need for more overall system understanding in the automotive sector. Modelica, as a suitable way for multi-physics modeling, is therefore applied by Bosch, e.g. to investigate energy flows amongst domains. We present a modular approach consisting of two parts to handle complexity and increase the performance: a modular library for the different domains and a co-simulation framework. To begin with, coupling aspects such as causality and communication are discussed in this context and their implementation is shown. A further focus is the variable macro step size that we developed within the framework for the automotive drive cycle simulation. The results of the modular approach are described and analyzed regarding error and performance aspects. Finally, challenges of the work are mentioned and an outlook, including FMI [2], [10], is given.