Systematic mapping of methods for real-time capable multibody simulation of road vehicles using PRISMA

Abstract Road vehicle dynamics studies the performance of road vehicles to improve their driving characteristics using the principles of multibody system dynamics. The growing importance of virtual design methods, especially of real-time applications like driving simulators, raises the demand for more accurate real-time vehicle models. This paper reports a systematic mapping, based on the PRISMA methodology, of scientific publications from 1999 to 2024 presenting real-time vehicle dynamics models and their underlying methods. It includes vehicle models with lumped-mass, lookup-table and multibody-based suspensions, as well as standalone multibody suspension models. Literature was retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar using keywords targeting real-time multibody simulation of vehicles and suspensions. From a total of 765 records, 109 eligible publications were analyzed in detail. The main findings are: (a) most of the publications consider multibody suspensions and focus on the research of related real-time methods; publications considering models with lumped-mass and lookup-table suspensions mainly focus on their real-time application; (b) the suspension elastokinematics is neglected in most of the multibody suspension models; if included, then mainly through bushing elements, with body flexibility rarely considered; (c) real-time capability can be achieved with various equations of motion formulation and integration methods, depending on the characteristics of the multibody suspension model; (d) diverse model simplifications and approaches in the equations of motion formulation, integration and implementation aim to reduce computation times. This study provides an overview of real-time vehicle dynamics models and methods with detailed explanation of the findings.