Predictive Control of Combustion Engines

The importance of engine control in view of the world wide increasing motorization and limited resources is evident, but the control technology usually employed in engines is based on simple concepts which do not exploit all the potentials of the system in terms of consumption and emissions.

Predictive control methods have been initially developed for systems with slow dynamics to take into account both optimal requirements and constraints on the states and the inputs. These methods have become continuously faster, are interesting and potentially an adequate approach to improve the performance of the engines.

The Predimot project - a part of the Regins-Interregional project - has aimed to extend and adapt predictive control methods. These proceedings of the Predimot workshop discuss the background, the numerical methods and the practical advantages of using such methods.

The results show that predictive control can produce impressive performance improvements in the case of transients, even when simple models are used. This holds for quite different engine structures (GDI vs. turbocharged Diesel engine), but also for different targets (emissions vs. cylinder wall temperature control).