Centralized and decentralized powertrain controllers for an earthmoving vehicle

This paper discusses the performance, robustness and design tradeoffs between decentralized and centralized control schemes from a powertrain perspective. It also demonstrates how a gain scheduling technique can be used effectively to design controllers for non-linear powertrain systems both in a centralized and a decentralized framework. Stability and performance analysis have been a challenge in a decentralized framework. A robust analysis technique for gain scheduled controller has been applied to the decentralized network in this correspondence. With this analysis tool, a robustness and performance analysis can be performed on the decentralized network when all the subsystem controllers are designed using gain scheduled controllers.