Digital Twin Concepts for Autonomous and Electric Vehicle Testing

The pace of innovation in the automotive industry is growing exponentially. Digital transformation has reached automotive with the move towards soft-ware-defined vehicles and digital twins to accelerate the definition, design, and production of cars, modules, and sensors. Automotive innovators need to push the boundaries of engineering to solve design, emulation, and test challenges quickly. When validating the functionality of a new vehicle in the real world, everything around it is a variable. Automakers control none of them, which poses a problem when testing the car’s functionality to a high degree of confidence. This paper discusses how testing in the lab using digital twins gives automotive OEMs control. We show the role of test and measurement in getting to the digital twin approach and how they are used in design and development, to help determine the impact of each variable in a testing scenario, which can then be repeatably and reliably tracked and measured.