Development of HILS Systems for Active Brake Control Systems

As the vehicle electronic control technology grows fast and becomes more sophisticated, a more efficient way than the traditional in-vehicle driving test is demanded for design, test, and tuning of electronic control units. For this purpose, HILS (hardware-in-the-loop simulation) scheme is very promising since significant portions of actual driving test procedures can be replaced by HIL simulation. The HILS method incorporates hardware components in the numerical simulation environment, and this yields results with better credibility than pure numerical simulations. In this study, HILS systems have been developed for active brake control systems: ABS (anti-lock brake system), TCS (traction control system), and ESP (electronic stability program). The system consists of the hardware part that includes the hydraulic brake mechanism and the ECUs, the software part that virtually implements the vehicle dynamics with visualization, and the interface part that links these two parts together. The HILS system in this research uses the commercial software CarSim to generate a detailed full vehicle model. Using the developed HILS system, the performance of a virtual vehicle was evaluated with commercial ECU modules under various driving conditions