Modelling and Simulation of Vehicle Kinematics and Dynamics

With the rapid growth in the automotive industry, vehicles have become more complex and sophisticated. Vehicle development today, involves integration of both electrical and mechanical systems. Their design and production are typically time and cost critical. To complement and support the process of vehicle development and design, majority of the automotive industry use modelling and simulationfor testing automotive applications, vehicle subsystems or the vehicle behaviour in its entirety. For the purpose of traffic simulations, where a large number of vehicles and other elements of the road network are simulated, implementing a highly complex vehicle model would greatly affect the performance of the simulation. The complexity of the vehicle model would entail a higher computation time of the system, making it unsuitable for any real time application. There in lies the trade-off indesigning a model that is both fast and accurate. The majority of the vehicle models that have been designed are either domain specific, highly complex or generalized. Thus, in this thesis, two class specific vehicles’ kinematic models with good accuracy and low computation time are presented. Two different modelling paradigms have been adopted to design and test these models. The results, challenges and limitations that pertain to these paradigms are also presented and discussed. The results show the feasibility of the proposed kinematic models