Energy-efficient control allocation for over-actuated systems with electric vehicle applications

This paper presents a new control allocation (CA) scheme for improving operational energy-efficiency of over-actuated systems. By explicitly incorporating actuator efficiency functions into the CA formulation, minimum power consumption is achieved while distributing the desired virtual control among the redundant actuators. For some physical systems (e.g. hybrid electric or pure electric vehicles with electric motors) whose actuators have dual actuation modes (e.g. driving or regenerative braking of electric motors) that possess different efficiencies and/or energy consuming or gaining characteristics, a virtual actuator method is devised to augment the systems for the energy-efficient CA scheme. An electric vehicle model with rear/front axle motors or four in-wheel / hub motors constructed in the full-vehicle CarSim ^® simulation package is used as an application case study to show the effectiveness of the proposed energy-efficient CA method.