A predictive control solution to driveline oscilation damping

This paper deals with the problem of damping driveline oscillations, which is crucial to improving driveability and passenger comfort. Recently, this problem has received an increased interest due to the introduction in several production vehicles of the dual-clutch powershift automatic transmission with dry clutches. This type of transmission improves fuel economy, but it results in a challenging control problem, due to driveline oscillations. These oscillations, also called shuffles, occur during gear-shift, while traversing backlash or when tip-in and tip-out maneuvers are performed. The first contribution of this paper is the derivation of an accurate piecewise affine drivetrain model with three inertias. The second contribution is concerned with the design of a horizon-1 predictive controller based on flexible Lyapunov functions. Several simulations based on realistic scenarios show that the proposed control scheme can handle both the performance and physical constraints, and the strict limitations on the computational complexity.