Design of a Customizable Test Bench of an Electric Vehicle Powertrain for Learning Purposes Using Model-Based System Engineering

Nowadays, electric vehicles attract significant attention because of the increasingly stringent exhaust emission policies all over the world. Moreover, with the fast expansion of the sustainable economy, the demand for electric vehicles is expanding. In the recent age, maintenance has seriously hampered the marketing and use of electric automobiles. As a result, the technique for maintaining electric vehicles is regarded as vital since it directly affects the security and availability for the end user and the passengers. Another key aspect of electric mobility is the integration of artificial intelligence in control, diagnostics, and prognostics. Meanwhile, a lot of research efforts are still devoted to developing and innovating electric traction systems, especially for diagnostic and prognostic purposes. Furthermore, topics covering important, current, and sustainability challenges should contain more than theoretical knowledge in high-quality education, particularly in engineering education. The purpose is to bridge the gap between the new technology and the learner’s circumstances through giving practical technical expertise and training in the sphere of overall engineering competences, to avoid non-standard, unskilled maintenance work. This article presents the first phase towards designing and developing a test bench of an electric vehicle’s powertrain used for research, learning and e-learning purposes, employing model-based systems engineering (MBSE) and systems modeling language (SysML) through the CESAM architecting and modeling framework. The aforementioned approach is used on our case study to build and present an operational viewpoint layout of the control, energy management, diagnostic, and prognostic test bench as part of the system’s initial phase of designing the system; the test bench layout proposed in this paper represents a flexible, low-cost, multidisciplinary downsized laboratory providing basic experiments related to e-mobility and covering numerous branches and study fields.