We report on a system of "Virtual running test environment for railway vehicle" based on Hardware In the Loop Simulation (HILS), which can replace the most part of an actual running test with bench tests and computer simulation. In the railway vehicle development, the applying computer simulation for acquiring the fundamental characteristics is effective to saving developing time and cost, but the simulation does not provide un-modeled phenomena. Therefore, the confirmation of vehicle characteristics through performance tests using actual cars is needed. Field tests are commonly carried out for this purpose, though; test conditions and the number of tests is greatly restricted because mostly running tests are conducted on lines used for commercial service. It is expected to shorten the development process and to improve the quality of the railway vehicle if it is made possible to reproduce the motion of a railway vehicle running on a track in detail by "Virtual running test environment for railway vehicles". In this report, we introduce the whole configuration of the "Virtual running test environment system for railway vehicles". And we explain dual actual usage of the system, which is as "Reproduction of the actual running conditions of a train set on the bench test" and as "Performance evaluation test of component part in the actual vehicle on the bench test". Finally we show some results. As an example, we conduct an excitation test on an actual car used to reproduce the running conditions of a three-car train on the rolling stock testing plant in RTRI and obtain a good agreement between the HILS test result and the target result.
