Prospects of the German multibody system research project on vehicle dynamics simulation

Abstract

The German Research Council (DFG) decided 1987 to establish a nationwide research project devoted to dynamics of multibody systems. In this project 14 universities and research centers are cooperating with the goal to develop a general purpose multibody system software package. This concept provides the opportunity to use a modular structure of the software, i.e. different multibody formalisms may be combined with different simulation programmes via standardized interfaces. For the DFG project the database RSYST was chosen using standard FORTRAN 77 and an object oriented multibody system datamodel was defined. According to the modular concept the requirements of vehicle system dynamics as tire models or railway wheel-rail models, respectively, are easily met. The Iltis benchmark problem is used to demonstrate some features of the object oriented datamodel.