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This paper describes challenges and possible solution of hybrid electrical vehicles test systems with a special focus on hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test bench. The degree of novelty of this work can be seen in the fact that development and test of ECU for hybrid electrical powertrains can move more and more from mechanical test benches with real automotive components to HIL test systems. The challenging task in terms of electrical interface between an electric motor ECU and an HIL system and necessary real-time capable simulation models for electric machines have been investigated and partly solved. Even cell balancing strategies performed by battery management systems (BMU) can be developed and tested using HIL technology with battery simulation models and a precise cell voltage simulation on electrical level.

Modern vehicles use electronic control units (ECUs) to perform their functions. The ECUs are becoming more powerful and more complex in terms of their functionality. Moreover, many functions are distributed across several interconnected ECUs. It is this interconnection via data bus (CAN) that enables sensors, calculated information and actuators to be shared. ECU manufacturers eliminate many errors during the project and testing phases of a single ECU, but many others are very difficult to detect without performing testing at integration and system level. This paper describes a concept and a powerful tool, VirtualCar, which allows a wide range of automatic tests to be performed on networked ECUs. The VirtualCar tool presented is based on hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) technology from dSPACE. It was designed and realized in a joint project by ELASIS, a FIAT-owned engineering company; dSPACE GmbH, Germany; and TESIS GmbH, Germany.