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The manufacturers of passenger cars increasingly assign development and production of complete subsystems to the supplying industry. A brake system supplier has to give predictions about system quality and performance long time before the first prototypical system is built or even before the supplier gets the order for system development. Nowadays, the usage of computer-aided system design and simulation is essential for that task. This article presents a tool designed to support the development process. A special focus will be on how to define quality. A formal definition of quality is provided, illustrated and motivated by two examples.

A real-time 3-dimensional, nonlinear simulator for the dynamical behaviour of trucks has been developed. The simulator serves as industrial test stand for examinations on different electronic control systems. This paper describes the challenging task of developing a powerful real-time simulator with hardware coupling based on parallel transputer systems. The integration of an anti-lock braking system (ABS) as hardware-in-the-loop by means of an interface electronic device is described. The interface electronics provide the coupling of the electronic control unit (ECU). The special demands on the signals and the resulting concept for the developed electronic interface are specified. Some results from dynamic braking simulations show the quality of the simulator.

For the development of electronic control units in modern automotive vehicles, real-time simulations have become an important tool. Using simulators for rapid control prototyping reduces the development time significantly. Testing electronic devices with hardware-in-the-loop simulators replaces many time consuming and expensive experiments. The computational performance needed for real-time simulations in vehicle dynamics may be achieved by parallel computer systems. As it is shown in this paper, multi-computer systems are particularly well suited for real-time simulations in vehicle dynamics and provide an inexpensive solution to the required hardware needs. The advantages of the multi-computer-based approach are presented and the scaleability of the system, due to the modularity of the simulator is shown. The parallelism of the simulator involves certain drawbacks which are discussed as well.