Pedal to pavement: An energy-based proper vehicle model

Partial and complete vehicle models are an essential element of the design process within the automotive industry. This paper constructs an energy-based (bond graph) proper model of a complete vehicle. This model includes all significant system dynamics generated from pressing on the gas pedal to the resulting vehicle translation. A complete model, containing 65 elements, is reduced via the Model Order Reduction Algorithm (MORA) to one that contains 22 elements, provides simulation results of adequate agreement, and still contains over 98% of the original system energy. The proper model reduces the number of calculations by 86% and the simulation time by 92%. The proposed model and modeling techniques presented in this paper could greatly improve the efficiency of automotive simulation and design.