Search Results

The safety of vehicle driving is within the focus of automotive development. In this work, an approach realizing cognitive awareness is introduced for automotive applications. The advantage of the approach is that the underlying Situation-Operator-Modeling (SOM) concept, can be applied to autonomous driving assuming that changes in the real world are to be considered and understood as a sequence of effects modeled by scenes and actions. For the representational level as part of the cognitive awareness approach, the SOM is used to model and structure the complex scenes of the driver-vehicle-environment interactions in general. First, the scene is modeled as a situation consisting of a group of characteristics, and the set of actions which are performed by the driver are specified and modeled as operators. In this work, passing maneuvers on highways are chosen as example.

In contrast to driver assistance systems focused on the vehicle-navigation or stabilization problems, the study of the loop-oriented interaction between driver, vehicle, and environment has been focused in the last years. The core of the proposed approach is the Situation-Operator-Modeling (SOM), which assumes that changes in the parts of the real world to be considered are understood as a sequence of effects modeled by scenes and actions. Based on SOM approach, the logic of interaction between the driver, the vehicle, and the environment can be formalized for supervision of the drivers' behaviors in a real car. Based on a general model of driving in combination with driver-vehicle-interaction developed in previous works, the personalization and individualization of the human driver model is focused.

In this paper, a fuel cell-based/SuperCapacitor (SuperCap) hybrid electric powertrain concept is studied for different power management strategies. For a series hybrid, range extender topology and a given load profile different power management strategies are structurally compared. Furthermore considerations about principal optimization approaches will be introduced. First, a power management with the usage of a rate limiter on the fuel cell power is studied. The usage of a rate limiter mitigates fast deterioration of the fuel cell service life. The limited power rate affects the power demand from the hybrid secondary power source, i.e. the SuperCaps, and a compromise needs to be found. A second power management focuses the use of fuel cells as a range extender for charging when a lower limit for the State-of-Charge (SOC) of the SuperCaps is reached. The charging however is done at the maximum power output of the fuel cells and stops, when a certain SOC is reached.

During development process phases, mechatronic systems needs to be quantified to decide in early design phase which topology or hardware satisfy the safety requirements regulated by law. The regulations by law are focused especially to reliability and safety oriented aspects of safety relevant systems or components. The contribution deals with the automation of formal processes from design to the generation of reliability-oriented evaluation allowing the consideration of alternatives and appearing conflicts between several additional aspects like cost, spatial needs etc.. During design stage, when relevant system factors are determined, the system architecture is designed, and a function oriented topology tree is generated, the construction of the reliability-oriented structure (topology), which is used to consider the reliability-oriented aspects, can be made.