During the validation of vehicles or components proving grounds are often used to generate well defined and repeatable loads within the vehicle. The picture shows the proving ground in Wörth at the Mercedes-Benz plant.
© Daimler AG
Optimizing Schedules on a Proving Ground or Collections of Standard Load Cases
Having derived a design load for the vehicle development process (e.g., with U·Sim), one often wants to map it to a schedule on the proving ground. There are three main reasons for doing this:
Besides the design load, input data for the tool are measurements on different test tracks (lanes) of a proving ground or in customer operation, from which a test scenario is to be compiled. These data include pseudo-damages for all relevant measured channels, properties of the tracks (length, duration, etc.), restrictions on the use of the tracks and the reference loads itself. The goal is to optimize a test schedule (find the optimum number of repetitions for each track) such that the combined load deviates as little as possible from the specified design loads.
As this needs to be fulfilled for many measured channels at the same time, the user interactively solves a multi-criteria optimisation problem and finds a good compromise. To be as flexible as possible with respect to the compromise, there are several objective functions available for optimisation:
Fraunhofer Institute for Industrial Mathematics ITWM