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The development of new technologies like advanced driver assistance systems or automated driving requires a flexible simulation environment of sufficient complexity. In general this flexibility is not provided by commercial software packages. This paper presents a three-dimensional and nonlinear hand-made model for heavy commercial vehicles including tractor and trailer as well as tractor and semitrailer combinations that can be used in different simulation environments, as well as in real-time applications. As typical for trucks, the torsional flexibility of the frame and a suspended driver's cabin are taken into account. The design kinematics makes it possible to handle different and quite complex axle suspensions very efficiently. Appropriate force elements are used to model various couplings between tractor and trailer or tractor and semitrailer, respectively. The virtual test truck environment (VTT) coded in ANSI C is extremely portable and can easily be embedded in commercial simulation packages like MATLAB/Simulink. It includes the TMeasy tyre model and offers flexible interfaces to third-party software tools.
n the automotive industry, simulations are needed to analyse the dynamics of vehicles and also of its main components and subsystems, e.g. tires, brakes and suspension systems. These simulations are required for an early-stage development and in consequence, they must deliver realistic results. Suspension systems plays a key role in comfort and safety of road vehicles. They usually consist of rigid links and force elements that are arranged with a specific topology. In addition, some of their functionalities are to carry the weight of the car and the passengers, and maintain a correct wheel alignment. In simulations involving suspension systems, lookup-tables are frequently used. They are obtained from a Kinematic and Compliance (KnC) test and then standardized for a specific vehicle simulation software. Nonetheless, lookup-tables require a reasonable number of characteristic points. Additionally, derivatives, interpolation, and extrapolation are not necessarily smooth. This produces results that depend on the interpolation technique and may be inaccurate. In this paper, a novel method called “design kinematics” is proposed. This method can describe the kinematic properties of almost any type of suspension systems. Comparisons with an analytic calculation and a KnC measurement shown that the design kinematics is able to represent the kinematic and compliance properties of suspension systems extremely well and very efficiently.