Vehicle height and posture control of the electronic air suspension system using the hybrid system approach

ABSTRACT

The electronic air suspension (EAS) system can improve ride comfort, fuel economy and handling safety of vehicles by adjusting vehicle height. This paper describes the development of a novel controller using the hybrid system approach to adjust the vehicle height (height control) and to regulate the roll and pitch angles of the vehicle body during the height adjustment process (posture control). The vehicle height adjustment system of EAS poses challenging hybrid control problems, since it features different discrete modes of operation, where each mode has an associated linear continuous-time dynamic. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to the modelling and controller design problem for the vehicle height adjustment system of EAS. The system model is described firstly in the hybrid system description language (HYSDEL) to obtain a mixed logical dynamical (MLD) hybrid model. For the resulting model, a hybrid model predictive controller is tuned to improve the vehicle height and posture tracking accuracy and to achieve the on–off statuses direct control of solenoid valves. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed approach are demonstrated by simulations and actual vehicle tests.

KEYWORDS:

• Electronic air suspension
• height control
• posture control
• hybrid systems
• model predictive control (MPC)
• vehicle test

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work was partly supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grant No. 51375212], a Project Funded by the Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions (PAPD), Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China [Grant No. 20133227130001], and China Postdoctoral Science Foundation [Grant No. 2014M551518].