Technical systems are becoming increasingly integrated, partly because of the intensive use of software due to de-mands for energy efficiency, performance and customizability. This leads to complicated interactions among the sub-systems during operation. The dynamic behaviour of such a system is hard to predict since every sub-system needs to be taken into account. Also, the sub-systems often differ in characteristics between engineering domains, and engineers therefore need to collaborate to make the prediction. A validated model is needed to predict how a change to a system will affect its behaviour. The paper investigates how the modelling, simulation and validation processes can be organ-ized in the described case where several engineers from different disciplines are involved. The application studied is a wheel loader that is complex and represents a large family of machines. In the resulting approach, teams of engineers from the different disciplines create one general-purpose model, each team using the most appropriate modelling envi-ronment. The system simulation is realized through coupled simulation, where accurate results are achieved by connect-ing the simulation environments by so-called bilateral delay lines.

Keywords: collaborative, multi-domain, hydraulics, multi-body dynamics, coupled simulation, bilateral delay lines