Use Case: VMC® for Drivetrain Development at MAN

In a close collaboration of MAN Truck & Bus and our institute between 2015 and 2018, VMC®-related methods have been adapted and applied within the drivetrain development at MAN. 

The emphasis was on assessing the correlation between properties of reference routes and the behaviour of truck users in the field with respect to drivetrain performance. Such a route may contain all consumption relevant road conditions in a mixture, which resembles the average usage of a truck. In that case, the route may be representative for either a long-haul application or for a distribution application but not for both. Another route may be constructed to contain all consumption relevant road conditions for observing the drivetrain performance (in test or simulation). In the latter case, the route is not representative for a group of truck users. Instead, data collected on that route need to be correlated to the customer usage of the truck in a certain market by means of usage models. 

Challenge: Representative Road Selection

Two tasks have been tackled namely, how to find a set of roads representing all relevant road conditions in a region and how to find a drivable route with a predefined length covering all these properties in a predefined mix.

The VMC®  feature »Representative Road Selection« has proven to be an effective procedure for finding pieces of road segments in an arbitrary region having certain properties needed for the subsequent analysis of drivetrain performance. For instance, the roads contained in such a representative set may directly be used within simulation tools for longitudinal dynamics. For real driving and performing measurements, a technique for the derivation of specific routes or tours having predefined properties has been developed.

As in the case of the representative road selection, MAN uses the results of the tour planning for longitudinal dynamics simulation as well as for real driving and measuring purposes.