Verification and Validation of Simulations for Rail Vehicle Certification

Reliable verification and validation of rail vehicle simulation models represent nowadays an important condition for applying simulations in rail vehicle certification processes. After a brief review of verifying and benchmarking multi-body simulation tools used to simulate rail vehicle dynamics, the recent progress of model validation methodologies for certifying rail vehicle running dynamics is presented. Peculiarities of on-track testing of rail vehicles considering them as the experiment for model validation are discussed, and the terms validation and application domain are introduced. This is followed by a comparison of validation quantities and metrics being suggested recently in various validation approaches for rail vehicle models. The impact of signal synchronization is presented and new findings regarding the effect of section selection used for the validation, which has not been investigated in any previous studies, is evaluated. The validation approach developed in the project DynoTRAIN and introduced in EN 14363:2016 shows small sensitivity to the inaccuracy of the signal synchronization. The overall validation result can change in dependency on the selected sections, but such change is rather seldom. The rail vehicle simulation models remain almost either validated or not validated, which confirms the robustness of the DynoTRAIN methodology.