Studies indicate that a substantial part of the modern vehicle's value comes from intelligent systems, and that these represent most of the current automotive innovation. To facilitate this, the modern automotive engineering process has to handle an increased use of mechatronics. Configuration and performance optimization, system integration, control, component, subsystem and system-level validation of the intelligent systems must become an intrinsic part of the standard vehicle engineering process, just as this is the case for the structural, vibro-acoustic and kinematic design. This requires a vehicle development process that is typically highly simulation-driven. The V-approach One way to effectively deal with the inherent multi-physics and the control systems development that is involved when including intelligent systems, is to adopt the V-Model approach to systems development, as has been widely used in the automotive industry for tw...