Supervisory Control for NOx Emission Compliance of Heavy-Duty Vehicles

Journal article, 2021

This article provides a detailed description of a supervisory control problem for a heavy-duty vehicle equipped with a diesel engine and an exhaust aftertreatment system (EATS). The control problem considers the coupling between the engine and EATS and assumes the availability of predictive driving information for a long horizon. The article also proposes a computationally efficient supervisory control algorithm, which is implemented in an existing engine electronic control unit. The algorithm is based on distributed economic nonlinear MPC. It minimizes total fuel consumption (by the diesel engine and EATS) and fulfils Euro VI real-driving and world harmonized transient cycle based NOx emission legislation for the heavy-duty diesel vehicle. The performance of the algorithm is evaluated using a high-fidelity simulation platform, which includes a validated GTPOWER model of a 13 L turbo compound diesel engine and the first-principles model of an EATS. Simulation results show that the supervisory controller has 1.7% less total fuel consumption, and 88.4% less NH3 slip, compared to a baseline controller, to achieve the same real-driving NOx emission.