I am a Vehicle Dynamics Engineer with ten years experience in the automotive industry. I currently lead R&D Coordination at Applus+ IDIADA, a cross-functional team developing and maintaining simulation, post-processing, testing and optimization software tools for the Vehicle Dynamics department.
My main focus outside of working hours (thankfully often inside, too) is vehicle simulation, spanning from multi-body models to point-mass lap time calculators, including everything in between: look-up table based models, and simplified vehicle models for optimal control.
Rather than relying on commercial tools, I like to build simulation software myself, as I think there’s hardly any better way to understand how those things work.
I have a soft spot for heuristic optimization, namely for the genetic algorithm, which I try to throw at whatever technical problem I encounter. More in general, I think automatic optimization to be heavily under-used in the vehicle dynamics field, its adoption being somewhat hindered by closed ecosystems of the SW tools we use. I believe there is a competitive advantage to be gained in VD by employing those methods, which is part of my current job.
I really like “classic” vehicle dynamics, the kind that you can understand with a pen, paper and mathematical analysis. I dedicate to that a good portion of my research time, messing around with equations until I find some interesting result that I’ll later realize to have been discovered by Milliken 50 years ago.
I can write working code in a handful of languages, including Matlab, Java, Fortran and C, but I mostly use Python, and C++ when I need better performance. I am not a big fan of AI-assisted coding (especially when coding as a pastime) but I do employ it whenever I have no particular interest in understanding what I’m doing (UIs, for example).
I am rather active on LinkedIn - my profile is:
LinkedIn Profile