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This paper presents a preliminary investigation of the closed-loop driver/articulated vehicle directional dynamics using numerical simulation. To date, a lot of attention has been focused on investigating the closed-loop directional dynamics of driver/single-unit vehicle systems. Little effort has been paid to examining the closed-loop directional dynamics of driver/articulated vehicle systems. Compared with single-unit passenger cars, multi-unit articulated vehicles have unique directional dynamic characteristics. Generally, a driver's behavior for an articulated vehicle is different from that for a passenger car. To investigate the impact of driver behavior on articulated vehicle directional dynamics, three driver models based on dynamic responses of tractor, trailer and combined tractor/trailer, respectively, have been developed.

Vehicle simulators are often used for vehicle system development and driver behaviour study. The target of this study is to design and evaluate an Active Trailer Steering (ATS) system for a Long Combination Vehicle (LCV) with mutiple trailers using a real-time vehicle simulator. A linear yaw-plane LCV model is generated to derive an optimal ATS controller. Then, the controller is reconstructed in LabVIEW and integrated with a vehicle model for a B-train double from TruckSim. The Driver-Software-in-the-Loop (DSIL) real-time simulations are conducted with the vehicle simulator. The DSIL real-time simulations indicate that the ATS controller can effectively improve the LCV's low-speed maneuverability and high-speed stability under the test maneuvers of a low-speed 90-degree turn and a high-speed single-lane change, respectively.