This paper presents a predictive vehicle stability control (VSC) strategy that distributes the drive/braking torques to each wheel of the vehicle based on the optimal exploitation of the available traction capability for each tire. To this end, tire saturation levels are defined as the deficiency of a tire to generate a force that linearly increases with the relevant slip quantities. These saturation levels are then used to set up an optimization objective for a torque distribution problem within a novel cascade control structure that exploits the natural time scale separation of the slower lateral handling dynamics of the vehicle from the relatively faster rotational dynamics of the wheel/tire.
The envisaged application of the proposed vehicle stability strategy is for vehicles with advanced and emerging pure electric, hybrid electric or hydraulic hybrid power trains featuring independent wheel drives. The developed predictive control strategy is evaluated for, a two-axle truck featuring such an independent drive system and subjected to a transient handling maneuver.
