Embedded Systems are increasingly equipped with open interfaces that enable communication and collaboration with other embedded systems. Collaborative embedded systems (CES) can be seen as an emerging new class of systems which, although individually designed and developed, can form collaborations at runtime. When embedded systems collaborate with each other, functions developed independently need to be integrated for performing evaluation of the resulting system in order to discover unwanted side-effects. Traditionally, early-stage validation and verification (V&V) of systems composed of collaborative subsystems is performed by function integration at design time. Simulation is used at this stage to verify system’s behaviour in a predefined set of test scenarios. In this paper we provide a survey of simulation methods and tools for the V&V of CES. In the context of one use case from the automotive domain (vehicle platooning) we present solutions (methods and tools) and challenges brought by evaluating vehicle collaboration using simulation.