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Traditionally, the assessment of durability and reliability in the ground vehicle industry has been relatively ad hoc with end-users often being the first to discover durability problems and so, inadvertently, becoming an integral part of the development process. Over time the industry has developed both field and laboratory based procedures that aim to simulate typical or severe customer usage. These procedures have been used to develop products by means of prototypes that are used to demonstrate the durability of the final product prior to its release. Varying durability objectives have often led to similar but different testing methods and procedures.

Today, increasing commercial pressures to develop and deliver reliable products in a timely manner necessitate more intelligent testing to be coupled with CAE procedures such as multi-body dynamics (MBD), finite element analysis (FEA), and fatigue life analysis, (FLA) into a coherent durability engineering process. In the future, as engineering processes come to rely even more heavily on CAE methods, engineering requirements will drive the development of predictive methods and systems that are more efficient and robust and can address a wider variety of applications than are currently possible.

This paper presents the methods for obtaining improved customer usage information and how that can be included within a durability process to refine and accelerate vehicle development through both physical and virtual methods.