Modern vehicles are complex systems consisting of an increasing large multitude of components that operate together. While functional verification on individual components is important, it is also important to test components within a driving environment, both from a functional perspective and from a driver perspective. One proven way for testing is vehicle simulators and in this work the main goals have been to increase flexibility and scalability by introducing a distributed driving simulator platform.

As an example, consider a workflow where a developer can go from a desktop simulation to an intermediate driving simulator to a high fidelity driving simulator with Hardware-In-the-Loop systems close to a finished vehicle in an easy way. To accomplish this, a distributed simulation architecture was designed and implemented that divides a driving simulator environment into four major entities with well-defined interfaces, using HLA as the method of communication. This platform was evaluated on two aspects, flexibility/scalability and timing performance. Results show that increased flexibility and scalability was achieved when using a distributed simulation platform. It is also shown that latency was only slightly increased when using HLA.