Unified modelling and real-time simulation of an electric vehicle

This paper describes the unified modelling of a mechatronic system by a single, graph-theoretic representation, with specific application to an electric vehicle with in-wheel motors. Using linear graph theory and symbolic computing, we present a systematic approach to formulating and simplifying the governing equations. An optimised computational sequence is generated in Maple/DynaFlexPro and exported to Matlab/Simulink to perform real-time dynamics simulations. Although applied to a vehicle model, the general methodology presented here is applicable to a wide range of mechatronic systems.