Combined wheel-slip control and torque blending using MPC

This article is concerned with the design of braking control systems for electric vehicles endowed with redundant braking actuators, i.e., with friction brakes and wheel-individual electric motors. Facing the challenge to optimally split the braking torque between these two actuators, a unified model predictive control (MPC) algorithm is presented here. The proposed algorithm unifies the wheel slip controller and the torque blending functions into a single framework. The capability of handling energy performance metrics, actuator constraints and dynamics, represents the main advantages of this approach. Simulation studies demonstrate that, in comparison with state-of-art solutions, the proposed control strategy is able to improve the wheel slip and torque tracking by more than 20%, with minor penalization in the energy recuperation.