Using Stochastic Dynamic Programming for Look-Ahead Control of a Wheel Loader Diesel Electric Transmission

Three Stochastic Dynamic Programming (SDP) implementations are developed for control of a diesel-electric wheel loader transmission. The implementations each use a stochastic description of the load, with the probabilities either independent of the states, dependent on previous power or on distance driven. Both the cycles used for the controller development and for the evaluation are derived from a measured sequence of cycles. The evaluation shows that SDP can be used for control of the engine speed and that the resulting trajectories from the three implementations are very similar. The most surprising part is that the method which has constant load probability is able to adjust to the actual load. The combination of the calculation efforts and the outcomes leads to the conclusion that the constant load probability implementation is superior to the other versions.