400 Commonwealth Drive, Warrendale, PA 15096-0001 U.S.A. Tel: (724) 776-4841 Fax: (724) 776-5760 SAE TECHNICAL PAPER SERIES 2000-01-0175 Quality Assurance of Driver Comfort for Automatic Transmissions Steff Schnetzler Expertsolutions / Volvo Technological Development Corp. Joakim Pettersson Volvo Technological Development Corp. Paavo Murtonen Volvo Car Corp. Reprinted From: Human Factors in 2000: Driving, Lighting, Seating Comfort, and Harmony in Vehicle Systems (SP–1539) SAE 2000 World Congress Detroit, Michigan March 6–9, 2000Downloaded from SAE International by Birmingham City Univ, Tuesday, August 21, 2018The appearance of this ISSN code at the bottom of this page indicates SAE’s consent that copies of the paper may be made for personal or internal use of specific clients. This consent is given on the condition,however, that the copier pay a $7.00 per article copy fee through the Copyright Clearance Center, Inc.Operations Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923 for copying beyond that permitted by Sec-tions 107 or 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law. This consent does not extend to other kinds of copying such ascopying for general distribution, for advertising or promotional purposes, for creating new collective works,or for resale. SAE routinely stocks printed papers for a period of three years following date of publication. Direct your orders to SAE Customer Sales and Satisfaction Department. Quantity reprint rates can be obtained from the Customer Sales and Satisfaction Department. To request permission to reprint a technical paper or permission to use copyrighted SAE publications in other works, contact the SAE Publications Group. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form, in an electronic retrieval system or otherwise, without the prior wr itten permission of the publisher. ISSN 0148-7191 Copyright © 2000 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc. Positions and opinions advanced in this paper are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of SAE. The author is solely responsible for the content of the paper. A process is available by which discussions will be printed with the paper if it is p ublished in SAE T ransactions. For permission to publish this paper in full or in part, contact the SAE Publications Group. Persons wishing to submit papers to be considered for presentation or publication through SAE should send the manuscript or a 3 00 word abstract of a proposed manuscript to: Secretary, Engineering Meetings Board, SAE. Printed in USAAll SAE papers, standards, and selected books are abstracted and indexed in the Global Mobility DatabaseDownloaded from SAE International by Birmingham City Univ, Tuesday, August 21, 20181 2000-01-0175 Quality Assurance of Driver Comfort for Automatic Transmissions Steff Schnetzler Expertsolutions / Volvo T echnological Development Corp. Joakim Pettersson Volvo Technological Development Corp. Paavo Murtonen Volvo Car Corp. Copyright © 2000 Society of Automotive Engineers, Inc. ABSTRACT This article describes an expert system for objective rating of subjective characteristics like driving comfort.The system uses radial basis neural networks that can betrained on any dynamic properties, for exampleacceleration. Training and retraining can be done in real-time. The system includes a measure of the reliability ofautomatic judgement, which can be used to signal whennew training may be necessary. The article shows in detail how the system has been used to automatically judge gearshift comfort forautomatic transmission. Tests indicate that the system’saccuracy and consistency are as good as one of Volvo’sbest experts. INTRODUCTION At Volvo Car Corporation, a standardised scale is used tomap subjective customer demands onto quality ratingsfrom 1 to 10 (Figure 1). Driver comfort is an importantmeasure closely related to overall quality, productconfidence and brand identity. Consequently, any majorchange in algorithms or hardware connected to the drivetrain of the vehicle