Vehicle Cabin Climate MPC Parameter Tuning Using Constrained Contextual Bayesian Optimization (C-CMES)

IEEE International Conference on Intelligent Transportation Systems (ITSC), pp. 1598–1603

Abstract

Climate-controlled cabins have for decades been standard in vehicles. Model Predictive Controllers (MPCs) have shown promising results in achieving temperature tracking in vehicle cabins and may improve upon model-free control performance. However, for the multi-zone climate control case, proper controller tuning is challenging, as externally, e.g., passenger-triggered changes in compressor setting and thus mass flow lead to degraded control performance. This paper presents a tuning method to automatically determine robust MPC parameters, as a function of the blower mass flow. Constrained contextual Bayesian optimization (BO) is used to derive policies minimizing a high-level cost function subject to constraints in a defined scenario. The proposed method leverages random disturbances and model-plant mismatch within the training episodes to generate controller parameters achieving robust disturbance rejection. The method contains a postprocessing step to achieve smooth policies that can be utilized in real-world applications. First, simulation results show that the mass flow-dependent policy outperforms a constant parametrization, while achieving the desired closed-loop behavior. Second, the robust tuning method greatly reduces worst-case overshoot and produces consistent closed-loop behavior under varying operating conditions.

Authors 3

1. Tim Reuscher Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University

2. Heike Vallery Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University · Erasmus MC · Delft University of Technology

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University

   Department of BioMechanical Engineering, Department for Rehabilitation Medicine, Erasmus MC, Delft University of Technology, Rotterdam, The Netherlands

3. Dirk Abel Aachen Institute of Automatic Control (IRT)

   RWTH Aachen University

   Affiliation as printed

   Institute of Automatic Control, RWTH Aachen University