Online control of automotive systems for improved real-world performance

Resumen

The need of improving the real-world fuel consumption and emission of automotive applications is the basis of this thesis. To this end, two verticals are explored: First is the online control of the powertrain systems. In state-of-the-art Optimal Control techniques (such as Dyanmic Programming, Pontryagins Minimum Principle, etc...) are extensively used to formulate the optimal control laws. These laws are stored in the production ECUs in the form of feedforward calibration maps. The unaccounted uncertainities related to the real-world during the powertrain calibration result in suboptimal operations of the powertrain in actual driving. Therefore, adaptive control methods are proposed in this work which, optimise the energy management of the conventional and the HEV powertrain control on real driving mission. The second vertical is regarding the vehicle speed control (popularly known as Eco-Driving in the literature) methods in real driving condition. In particular, speed advisory systems are proposed for real time application on a vehicle. The control methods developed for each application are described in details with their verication and validation on the designed case studies. Apart from the developed control methods, there are three tools that were developed and used at various stages of this thesis: A vehicle model, A driving cycle prediction tool and optimal control methods (dynamic programming, PMP and ECMS). Depending on the application, the developed methods were implemented on the Hardware-In-Loop Internal Combustion Engine testing setup or on a real vehicle. The results show signicant improvements in the performance of the powertrain in terms of fuel economy and emissions in comparison to the state-of-the-art methods.