Real-time simulation for electric powersteering control system

In a competitive world, using real-time simulation rather than off-line simulation provides significant advantage for imitating system dynamics in a real world. In this paper, a real time simulation mechanism is presented for studying dynamics of electro-mechanical systems. The presented real-time simulation is conducted on a two-node computer platform engineered by RT-Lab (TM), a software product of Opal-RT Technologies, Inc., as an illustrating example, for an electric power steering(EPS) control system model with CarSim (TM), a software product of Mechanical Simulation Corporation for vehicle dynamics. The whole system simulation is operated in fixed-step real time and the simulation result is validated by its off-line simulation counterpart. It is pointed out that this real-time simulation set-up could be easily converted into a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation carrying real hardware such as a real steering motor and an electronic control unit, etc., when deemed as necessary.