Undesidered drift of multibody models excited by measured accelerations or forces

In the ground vehicle industry, it is important to simulate multibody models of the full vehicle based on wheel forces and moments in order to derive section forces at certain components for durability assessment. This is difficult due to noise in the input data and the unavoidable deviation between the model and real vehicle. Both lead to an undesired drift of the vehicle model in the simulation. This paper shortly describes the sources of these effects and shows that, due to missing knowledge about the true trajectory of the vehicle, this problem cannot be solved by an improved numerical treatment of the underlying equations. Several ways to deal with the problem are briefly reported. Finally, a simple vehicle model is used to show all the effects.