Multi-Disciplinary Simulation of Vehicle System Dynamics

Modeling and computer simulation play an important role in all engineering disciplines. As specialized simulation tools have become very sophisticated and, at the same time, the simulation of complex systems and phenomena showed the limits of mono-disciplinary approaches, multi-disciplinary simulation has gained wide acceptance. For the coupling of different simulation tools interfaces are necessary, including both aspects of physics and numerics as well as of software engineering. This paper tries to give a general classification of interfaces between simulation tools. Following, the multibody simulation approach is presented. With a great number of interfaces to other engineering disciplines like FEA, CAD, CFD, and control design engineering, multibody simulation programs are true multidisciplinary tools which can be used from the pre-design phase to trouble shooting on a production vehicle. As an example, the MBS tool SIMPACK and its integration in the concurrent engineering loop will be presented along with two applications from automotive and aerospace design