Automotive Model Predictive Control

Automotive control has developed over the decades from an auxiliary te- nology to a key element without which the actual performances, emission, safety and consumption targets could not be met. Accordingly, automotive control has been increasing its authority and responsibility - at the price of complexity and di?cult tuning. The progressive evolution has been mainly ledby speci?capplicationsandshorttermtargets,withthe consequencethat automotive control is to a very large extent more heuristic than systematic. Product requirements are still increasing and new challenges are coming from potentially huge markets like India and China, and against this ba- ground there is wide consensus both in the industry and academia that the current state is not satisfactory. Model-based control could be an approach to improve performance while reducing development and tuning times and possibly costs. Model predictive control is a kind of model-based control design approach which has experienced a growing success since the middle of the 1980s for "e;slow"e; complex plants, in particular of the chemical and process industry. In the last decades, severaldevelopments haveallowedusing these methods also for "e;fast"e;systemsandthis hassupporteda growinginterestinitsusealsofor automotive applications, with several promising results reported. Still there is no consensus on whether model predictive control with its high requi- ments on model quality and on computational power is a sensible choice for automotive control.