Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

This research aims at developing an improved method for the automated design synthesis of mechatronic vehicles with integrated control systems (ICSs), involving differential braking control, active steering control and active roll moment control. The method will be used for automating the design synthesis of vehicles so that the mechanical and control subsystems will be simultaneously optimized. This proposed new approach will build upon the applicant's previous research in design methodologies of mechatronic vehicles. In the existing methodology, an original design problem is decomposed into a two-level optimization. However, this methodology is not suitable for the design synthesis of mechatronic vehicles with ICSs. The reasons for this are twofold:  firstly, the optimization algorithm at the system level has difficulties coordinating a large number of design criteria and constraints, resulting from the decomposition of the original system design into the many subsystem designs at the only subsystem level; secondly, from the perspective of functional design, the integrated control systems are frequently decomposed into multi-level architectures.    In order to extend the existing methodology, the proposed research will focus on the following three original investigations: (1) Decomposition of vehicle design targets: the research will derive a systematic design target decomposition approach considering both mechanical and control subsystems. (2) Automated dynamic modeling: multibody dynamics, symbolic formulations and modular modelling techniques will be integrated to generate various models for design evaluations at various levels in the multi-level optimizations. The models will include vehicle-level and sub-level models, which will retain the corresponding mechanical and control properties. (3) Design framework: a novel design framework will be developed for integrating multi-level optimization formulation methods, dynamic modelling techniques and search algorithms.      Overall, this research is expected to yield valuable techniques and guidelines for automated design syntheses of complex mechatronic systems consisting of mechanical, control and other related subsystems.