Communication-Aware Bandwidth-Optimized Predictive Control of Motor Drives in Electric Vehicles

To address the ever growing complexity of electric vehicles, several control functions can be integrated over a single shared intravehicle network, e.g., controller area network (CAN). However, sharing communication resources may lead to communication delays that affect control performance. Well-known communication standards allow to introduce different quality-of-service guarantees on a message-by-message basis. This study focuses on predictive control of motor drives; the model predictive control (MPC) approach is extended to jointly decide the value of each control command and its transmission priority on the CAN bus. A mixed integer quadratic problem is derived in which the transmission strategies are modeled by a two-class priority scheme and the corresponding values of delay variation are transformed into loss probabilities by introducing receiver buffers. System-level simulations show that the proposed approach uses high priority when the system behavior is farther from the desired one or bus is congested and the tracking error is reduced with respect to the traditional MPC and unprioritized transmission.