Future vehicle dynamics control and driver assistance systems - Numberless configurations and control engineering challenges

Each new generation of vehicles offers new driving safety, ride comfort and assistance systems, and the vehicles become safer and more comfortable under the given driving conditions. This article recapitulates the developments over recent years and points out that numerous systems are already available, such as brake control, damping control, active chassis and various forms of active steering. Clearly the networking of the systems and the optimization of the interplay with conventional chassis elements is becoming an increasingly important subject. We discuss this issue in the concrete case of the chassis systems technology of the F400 Carving and subsequently take a closer look at the benefits and problems posed by future systems: the organization of cooperative coexistence of complex individual systems the necessary analysis and design methods the design of the interplay between the driver and the assistance feature the utility assessment from different perspectives, especially the customer's. The first two aspects directly lead to complex systems analysis tasks, which in view of their multidisciplinary nature, the non-linearity typical of motor vehicles and the constantly restricted sensor system and computing performance, lead even state-of-the-art design methods to their limits. On the other hand, the driver-vehicle interactions and the beneficial aspects significantly expand the set of relevant assessment parameters and thereby supplement dimensions that are technically less sharp.