Logical control approach to fuel efficiency optimization for commuting vehicles

A novel gearshift control approach for improving the fuel efficiency of the conventional commuting vehicles is addressed in this paper, where the optimization problem for gear control is formulated in the framework of stochastic logical dynamic system. By extracting the stochastic features of the driver acceleration intention in the specific route, the Markov process model is deduced and then applied for the optimization algorithm. Based on the logical system framework, the finite horizon optimization problem is solved by means of the algebraic expression of the dynamic programming algorithm with a lower computational complexity, thereby resulting in an optimal gearshift decision law in statistical sense. The software simulation and engine-in-the-loop based experiment results demonstrate the better fuel economy performance can be achieved by the proposed logic control scheme.