Toward Smart Vehicle-to-Everything-Connected Powertrains: Driving Real Component Test Benches in a Fully Interactive Virtual Smart City

In the context of increasing electrification and the automation of future mobility, research and development of efficient powertrains requires enhanced test methods. One important aspect to consider is the complex interactions among a smart driving strategy, traffic flow, an individual vehicle's energy demand and emissions, and the corresponding overall values. Until now, the respective development domains of traffic flow control, powertrain control, component design, and intervehicle communication have usually been considered separately. This article presents a methodology that combines these areas and enables developers to obtain deep and highly realistic system insights, taking into account the mutual interactions among the domains. For this purpose, an X-in-the-loop validation platform is constructed that builds upon vehicular networking, road traffic, and a vehicle simulator, all coupled with two real drive-unit component test benches. We further show how this methodology can be used to investigate the effects of a novel predictive powertrain control algorithm that takes vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication into account. Focusing on a typical urban reference route, we demonstrate that our algorithm enables performance to be maintained using electric motors with reduced specifications.