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The Powertrain Analysis and Computational Environment (PACE) is a powertrain simulation tool that provides an advanced behavioral modeling capability for the powertrain subsystems of conventional or hybrid-electric vehicles. Due to its origins in Argonne National Lab’s Autonomie, PACE benefits from the reputation of Autonomie as a validated modeling tool capable of simulating the advanced hardware and control features of modern vehicle powertrains. However, unlike Autonomie that is developed and executed in Mathwork’s MATLAB/Simulink environment, PACE is developed in C++ and is targeted for High-Performance Computing (HPC) platforms. Indeed, PACE is used as one of several actors within a comprehensive ground vehicle co-simulation system (CRES-GV MERCURY): during a single MERCURY run, thousands of concurrent PACE instances interact with other high-performance, distributed MERCURY components.

The ability to quickly and automatically evaluate vehicle designs is a critical tool in an efficient vehicle design process. This paper presents techniques for vehicle parameter estimation using automatic intelligent simulations. These techniques enable the efficient and automatic evaluation of many important aspects of vehicle designs. The effectiveness of this approach is demonstrated by using vehicle tests that are commonly performed on military ground vehicles. Our simulation techniques are able to determine the relevant vehicle performance characteristics in a much more efficient manner than could be done previously. This is done automatically, once the user has specified the type of test to be performed. A terrain sample is automatically generated and the vehicle’s behavior on each terrain instance is evaluated until the specified test conditions are met.