Model and Observer Based Control of Internal Combustion Engines

Much progress has been made in the area of electronic engine controls since their introduction in the 1980’s. This progress has included significant improvements in fuel economy and emissions reductions. Nevertheless current ECU’s (Engine Control Units) are much less advanced than those which can be found in the literature. These advanced controllers are most often model based and include nonlinear estimators, adaptive and neural network systems, sliding mode systems, etc. The purpose of this paper is to review critically some of the more interesting, important and promising advanced systems with a view toward implementing practical model based ECU’s with improved performance.