Modeling and Simulation of Future Vehicle Powernets 2004-01-1697

Future vehicle electrical systems will differ substantially from current ones due to rising requirements. For example driver-assistance and drive-by-wire systems will lead to novel and demanding electrical load profiles which in turn will pose new requirements on the electrical system. Furthermore safety concepts, reliability, availability and diagnosis are getting increasingly important in such systems and thus also in the vehicle's electrical system.

In order to meet the upcoming requirements new concepts for future vehicle electrical systems have to be developed such that the new powernet is able to adapt flexibly to different situations or failures by routing the energy through different channels. For efficiency the corresponding development process should be based on modeling and simulation techniques. Depending on the design or analysis task, the powernet is represented through different modeling descriptions. One representation is the description with function objects which can be arranged modularly or hierarchically. For computation of reliability and other characteristics of electrical system topologies the net is represented as a graph or flow network. For the description of the global network state and the local states of the subsystems the power distribution points are described as discrete event systems. The modeling methodology developed in this work is a core competence, needed to design future vehicle electrical systems with regard to safety and reliability.