College of Engineering – Control Seminar Series

New product development in the automotive industry faces ever increasing pressures to reduce vehicle fuel consumption, tailpipe emissions, cost and time-to-market in a global economic environment. In the area of powertrain, this translates to introduction of new technologies as well as revisiting existing design solutions, which in turn presents new tasks and challenges to powertrain control.

In this talk, the opportunities for advanced control design methods to serve as enablers in the field of automotive powertrain control will be discussed, in the framework of one of the all-time-favorite problems in the field: idle speed control of a spark-ignition engine. The application of adaptive "posicast" control for time-delay systems, explicit Model Predictive Control, and Speed-Gradient nonlinear control design approaches will be presented. The appeal and suitability of these solutions for mainstream production and the trade-offs dictated by a multitude of requirements will be discussed as well.

Diana Yanakiev completed her PhD and MS degrees in EE (control systems) at UCLA in 1997 and 1994 respectively. In 1989 she received a Diploma from the Technical University of Sofia, Bulgaria. The topic of her graduate research was longitudinal control of heavy-duty vehicles on automated highway systems. From 1997 to 2001, Dr. Yanakiev worked at Cummins Engine Company in the areas of engine testing automation and diesel engine control. She joined Ford Motor Company in 2001 and has worked on control of hybrid vehicles and spark-ignition internal combustion engines.