Abstract
Many industry sectors are currently experiencing a strong demand for electrification. This applies to the automotive industry, which aims for production of hybrid and full electric vehicles to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and proceed to environmentally compatible transportation. Electrification calls for a range of system components, that need to be developed and tested. On one hand, these system components include hardware components, like battery cells, modules, and packs, and battery management systems (BMS). On the other hand, software components are used for testing, e.g., algorithms for BMS or simulation models for batteries. Execution of tests on real batteries is typically time- and cost-intense, and includes considerable risks, leading to safety hazards.

In the proposed conference contribution, we introduce a novel test approach for battery systems, that is driven by a unified, standardized interface between hardware- and software components. It allows to seamlessly exchange real hardware components with software components, and vice versa. The Distributed Co-Simulation Protocol (DCP) is used to encapsulate and virtualize these components, as shown in a demonstrator use case. A DCP master is used for effective configuration and re-configuration of these socalled DCP slaves.

Our approach is based on both open-source and industrial simulation software solutions. By making these software- and hardware components available in distributed computing environments, full control and ownership of these components is not necessary anymore. This leads to the concept of battery-as-a-service, where a set of components can be selected, acquired, configured, used for testing, and released, within a limited amount of time. This can be done repeatedly at a maximum safety level, which is defined by the component provider itself.

This concept appears to be promising in multi-stakeholder environments, with distributed development of components, and large numbers of different test cases.