Calculating road input data for vehicle simulation

Multibody system simulation is an important tool in the development process in vehicle engineering. Without much effort, different vehicle variants and designs can be simulated, analyzed, and optimized. This is of particular relevance in an early stage of development, when no physical prototypes are available yet. In order to simulate the vehicle models under realistic conditions, suitable input data is needed for the simulation. We present an approach to derive a virtual road profile based on a tire-surrogate model, measured spindle forces, and a multibody system model of the measurement vehicle. In contrast to the measured spindle forces, the road profile together with the tire-surrogate model can be used to simulate other vehicle variants, for which no measurements are available. The road profile is derived by solving an inverse control problem. We formulate this inverse problem in the context of system simulation and provide a short mathematical analysis. Additional ly, we discuss a solution approach, the method of control-constraints, which is also applied in a numerical simulation study to compute a virtual road profile.