Heavy Vehicles Modeling with the Vehicle Dynamics Library

The Vehicle Dynamics Library (VDL) [1, 2] was originally designed for studies on vehicle handling for passenger cars (VDL/Cars). It was early clear that an extension into the heavy vehicles domain would be natural. The inherent flexibility and extensibility of the Modelica-based solutions offers great benefits in this domain where a vast set of vehicle configurations and variants must be handled, such as combinations of trucks, tractors, full trailers, semi-trailers, tankers, with various axle and powertrain configurations, and also a wide range of payload conditions. This paper introduces the VDL/Trucks option of VDL aimed at modeling and simulation of heavy vehicles.