Levels of Modeling a Hybrid-Electric Vehicle: Simulation, SIL, Real-Time, and HIL 2010-01-0943

Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology is one of 17 universities competing in EcoCAR: The NeXt Challenge, a three year international competition where teams are challenged to design, build, and test a hybrid vehicle architecture utilizing alternative fuels to reduce the energy consumption and emissions production of a 2009 production GM vehicle [ 1 ]. Teams are presently in year one of the competition where students choose an architecture, specify components, and design the vehicle. Design includes both the mechanical integration of the parts as well as design of the supervisory control system for the hybrid system. Year two of the competition is the build phase, and year three is the optimization and refinement phase. The design phase lasts approximately 9 months and most teams will completely replace the original powertrain with a hybrid powertrain. To accomplish this task and bring the design to a point where implementation can begin at the start of the second year requires teams to use industry standard tools and state-of-the-art modeling techniques. The EcoCAR competition provides tools from several vendors including The MathWorks [ 2 ], National Instruments [ 3 ], Freescale Semiconductor [ 4 ], Woodward MotoTron [ 5 ], and Vector-CANtech [ 6 ]. It is the philosophy of Rose-Hulman to use all of the tools as an integrated suite, apply those tools to the design of a complex system such as a hybrid-electric vehicle, and migrate those tools into the Rose-Hulman curriculum. [ 7 , 8 , 9 ] This paper discusses the tools and the modeling techniques used to design the vehicle.