This presentation was made at the NAFEMS Americas Conference "Simulation in the Automotive Industry: Creating the Next Generation Vehicle" held on the 16-18 March 2021.

The automotive engineering community is now confronting the largest technology transformation since its inception. The demand to manufacture cleaner, safer, and smarter vehicles, along with providing an overall enhanced driving and ride experience, has never been higher. As a result, engineering teams must discover, evaluate, and successfully implement leading-edge technology and methods to produce reliable, effective results.

Hence, the challenges for automotive engineers are enormous and require a significant increase in the upfront use of numerical simulation capabilities, methods, and processes such that they’re able to efficiently design, manufacture and deliver these innovative technologies to market in greater speeds than ever before.

Resource Abstract

Connectivity is a required aspect for autonomous driving, as having an accurate and timely situational awareness in terms of the obstacles are prerequisite for autonomous trajectory creations and navigation. This would require that accurate 3-d maps be available for all roadways in which navigation is desired and all objects that can speak for themselves or not be recognized in real-time. All these require sufficient data and frameworks to simulate vehicles. As the connectivity frameworks change constantly such as going from 4G-LTE to 5G and beyond, simulations will require more data and potentially evolving architecture in order to determine the connectivity aspects, including data rates and communication delay. In addition, their work-case outages are also required to simulate how a connectivity starved automated vehicle will proceed until connectivity is regained. The automation will need to have sufficient failure handling algorithms and failure scenarios to test them. In addition, as the sensors, actuators and control algorithms evolve, more standardized data sets will be required to provide simulating the combination of these systems.