eta/VPG: A Virtual Crash and Safety Environment for FMVSS and ECE Standards

Vehicle manufacturers, in an effort to reduce costs and meet the demand of customers are constantly reducing product development time. At the same time we see more regulations from governments, primarily aimed at vehicle safety. In additions there are variations in global regulations, such as ECE and FMVSS regulations. In order to meet the objective of reducing time and costs, manufacturers are forced to rely more and more on the virtual prototype to avoid the time and cost of constructing and testing prototypes, and to gain the insight necessary to make the current vehicle design better than past products in the area of performance and efficiency. These, in the minds of the engineering community, may be contradicting objectives. We have less time to perform more analyses, and not only that, but more critical analyses which may have more impact on the success of the vehicle when compared to the commercial impact of the analyses performed 5-10 years ago. The automotive industry is legally required to design vehicles to meet the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) or ECE/EEC Homologation Regulations as well as Corporate/Industry Standards. These standards are ever-increasing due to consumer awareness and the industry focus on vehicle safety, resulting in a conflict – we are increasing the simulation workload, and shrinking the time available to perform the analysis. Therefore, there exists a need to streamline all routine processes, and gain maximum efficiency from the engineer’s limited time. This paper describes the development of a set of tools which enable engineers to automate many routine crash and safety analysis tasks, gaining efficiency, accuracy and productivity.