Increasing demands regarding a vehicle's reliability, efficiency, and fuel consumption require an ever better description of operating loads as a basis for component design. The current state-of-the-art for obtaining these is to perform measurement campaigns onboard a test vehicle outfitted with expensive sensor technology. This approach yields very accurate information regarding subsystem loads, but these are highly dependent on the vehicle and the limited number of tracks and operating conditions that could be investigated.

The idea of the virtual measurement campaign (VMC) is to create a broader overview of operating conditions via simulation. Using relatively simple vehicle and driver models coupled with navigational maps and other environmental data, we can generate virtual test drives of any desired length on a computer. ITWM is currently developing a system that can integrate various data sources and performing this kind of analysis. One application would be using digital map and topographical data to obtain the curvature and slope of arbitrary routes.

In the short term, the most important goal of VMC is to improve the planning of real measurement campaigns and to enable the relative comparison of markets. The latter would allow using measurement data collected for one region to estimate loads for another. In the long run, improved driver and vehicle models could also be used to perform a purely virtual measurement campaign.