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Electric drives are growing in importance in automotive applications, especially in hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) and in the vehicle dynamics area (steering systems, etc.). The challenges of real-time hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation and testing of electric drives are addressed in this paper. In general, three different interface levels between the electric drive and the hardware-inthe-loop system can be distinguished: the signal level (1), the electrical level (2) and the mechanical level (3). These interface levels, as well as modeling and I/O-related aspects of electric drives and power electronics devices, are discussed in detail in the paper. Finally, different solutions based on dSPACE simulator technology are presented, for both hybrid vehicle and steering applications.

This paper describes challenges and possible solution of hybrid electrical vehicles test systems with a special focus on hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) test bench. The degree of novelty of this work can be seen in the fact that development and test of ECU for hybrid electrical powertrains can move more and more from mechanical test benches with real automotive components to HIL test systems. The challenging task in terms of electrical interface between an electric motor ECU and an HIL system and necessary real-time capable simulation models for electric machines have been investigated and partly solved. Even cell balancing strategies performed by battery management systems (BMU) can be developed and tested using HIL technology with battery simulation models and a precise cell voltage simulation on electrical level.

Modern vehicles use Electronic Control Units (ECU), connected via Controller Area Network (CAN) to perform functions. Many of these functions are distributed across several ECUs. This network interconnection enables the sharing of sensors, calculated information and actuators. As new functionality is added, the number of ECUs and their complexity increase. This paper describes the values and possibilities of a Hardware-In-the-Loop (HIL) based Integration Lab, which enables a wide range of automatic tests to be performed on networked ECUs. The Integration Lab is the complex rebuild of a Scania truck/bus, containing the ECU superset, for connecting and testing networked ECUs. It involves more than 30 ECUs and eleven CAN networks.