Currently, innovations in mechatronic products often occur at the system level, requiring consideration of component interactions throughout the entire development process. In the earlier phases of development, this is accomplished by coupling virtual prototypes such as simulation models. As the development progresses and real prototypes of certain system components become available, real-virtual prototypes (RVPs) are established with the help of network communication. However, network effects—all of which can be interpreted as latencies in simplified terms—distort the system behavior of RVPs. To reduce these distortions, we propose a coupling method for RVPs that compensates for latencies. We present an easily applicable approach by introducing a generic coupling algorithm based on error space extrapolation. Furthermore, we enable online learning by transforming coupling algorithms into feedforward neural networks. Additionally, we conduct a frequency domain analysis to assess the impact of coupling faults and algorithms on the system behavior of RVPs and derive a method for optimally designing coupling algorithms. To demonstrate the effectiveness of the coupling method, we apply it to a hybrid vehicle that is productively used as an RVP in the industry. We show that the optimally designed and trained coupling algorithm significantly improves the credibility of the RVP.

The ongoing connection and automation of vehicles leads to a closer interaction of the individual vehicle components, which demands for consideration throughout the entire development process. In the design phase, this is achieved through co-simulation of component models. However, complex co-simulation environments are rarely (re-)used in the verification and validation phases, in which mixed real-virtual prototypes (e.g. Hardware-in-the-Loop) are already available. One reason for this are coupling errors such as time-delays, which inevitably occur in co-simulation of virtual and real-time systems, and which influence system behavior in an unknown and generally detrimental way. This contribution introduces a novel, adaptive method to compensate for constant time-delays in potentially highly nonlinear, spatially distributed mixed real-virtual prototypes, using small feedforward neural networks. Their optimal initialization with respect to defined frequency domain features results from a-priori frequency domain analysis of the entire coupled system, including coupling faults and compensation methods. A linear and a nonlinear example demonstrate the method and emphasize its suitability for nonlinear systems due to online training and adaptation. As the compensation method requires knowledge only of the bandwidths, the proposed method is applicable to distributed mixed real-virtual prototypes in general.