Toward a Systematic Design for Turbocharged Engine Control

The efficient development of high performance control is becoming more important and more challenging with ever tightening emissions legislation and increasingly complex engines. Many traditional industrial control design techniques have difficulty in addressing multivariable interactions among subsystems and are becoming a bottleneck in terms of development time. In this article we explore the requirements imposed on control design from a variety of sources: the physics of the engine, the embedded software limitations, the existing software hierarchy, and standard industrial control development processes. Decisions regarding the introduction of any new control paradigm must consider balancing this diverse set of requirements. In this context we then provide an overview of our work in developing a systematic approach to the design of optimal multivariable control for air handling in turbocharged engines.