Development of a Graphical User Interface (GUI) Based Tool for Vehicle Dynamics Evaluation

Objective metrics for performance evaluation of ride, handling and steering are required to compare, validate and optimize dynamic behavior of vehicles. Some of these objective metrics are recommended and defined by International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE), which involve data processing, statistical analysis and complex mathematical operations on acquired data through simulation or experimental testing. Due to the complexity of operations and volume of data, evaluation is often time consuming and tedious. Process automation using existing tools such as MS Excel, nCode, Siemens LMS, etc. includes several limitations and challenges, which make it cumbersome to implement. This work is about development of a centralized platform for quantification, visualization and comparison of ride, handling and steering performance metrics obtained from testing and simulation data as per relevant ISO standards. In this work ISO standards related to ride (ISO 2631-1, 2631-5, 10326), handling (ISO 4138, 7401) and steering (ISO 13674-1) are implemented and automated using built-in functions and toolboxes in MATLAB. Further, several mathematical tools and operations such as plot comparisons in time and frequency domain, filtering (band pass), data treatment (detrending, median filtering, etc.), coherence and delays, etc. are included, which are frequently used in addition to standard ISO and SAE metrics. Complete package is compiled as a user-friendly standalone graphical user interface (GUI), which enables cross-domain users to make use of it with minimal tool usage guidelines and with no license requirement. © 2019 SAE International. All Rights Reserved.