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In this paper, the dynamic vehicle element (DVE) method is developed to solve the transient response of a vehicle–structure interaction system in time domain. The DVE method treats the vehicle as a moving part of the entire system, which considers the vehicle influence at the element level by incorporating the detailed interaction between multiple vehicles and the structure induced by irregular road profiles. In addition, a simplified decoupled dynamic nodal loading (DNL) method is proposed. The DNL method generates a time series of concentrated nodal loading which represents the vehicle reaction force on the structure. The DNL method therefore, accounts for the road irregularities and vehicle inertia effect, but neglects the interaction between the two subsystems. The simplified DNL method can be degenerated into the commonly used moving mass (MM) method and moving load (ML) method. The DVE, DNL …