Cross-Platform Co-Simulation for Vehicle Safety Analysis

Cross-platform co-simulation is gaining more popularity nowadays for vehicle safety analysis. Essential elements, such as ADAS (advanced driver-assistance system) sensors, vehicle dynamics, occupant posture, and controller, can be individually solved in each software and effectively connected to the toolchain. The concept of co-simulation well suits the vehicle integrated safety analysis, which consists of both (1) the active safety features, such as autonomous emergency braking, lane keeping, etc., and (2) the passive safety features, such as the airbag, seatbelt pretensioner, etc. The co-simulation also extends the vehicle safety analysis from the traditional in-crash to a more comprehensive inclusion of pre-crash so as to evaluate the dummy posture and injury more precisely. To achieve this purpose, LS-DYNA® develops a co-simulation feature based on the Functional-Mockup-Interface (FMI), which allows LS-DYNA to remotely exchange data with any 3rd party software supporting this standard. Two cases are demonstrated hereby: the first is a passive safety co-simulation between LS-DYNA and MATLAB, where MATLAB controls the seatbelt pretension force, timing and the airbag deployment in LS-DYNA; the second case is the integrated safety case focusing on the active seatbelt control, where ANSYS VRX Driving Simulator solves the vehicle dynamics, and MATLAB provides the controller of braking/acceleration in VRX as well as the seatbelt/airbag in LS-DYNA. Both cases reveal that a more accurate occupant posture and significant improvement of occupant injury can be achieved by optimizing the active/passive safety features through the co-simulation.