Virtual-Sensor-Based Maximum-Likelihood Voting Approach for Fault-Tolerant Control of Electric Vehicle Powertrains

This paper describes a sensor fault-tolerant control (FTC) for electric-vehicle (EV) powertrains. The proposed strategy deals with speed sensor failure detection and isolation within a reconfigurable induction-motor direct torque control (DTC) scheme. To increase the vehicle powertrain reliability regarding speed sensor failures, a maximum-likelihood voting (MLV) algorithm is adopted. It uses two virtual sensors [extended Kalman filter (EKF) and a Luenberger observer (LO)] and a speed sensor. Experiments on an induction-motor drive and simulations on an EV are carried out using a European urban and extraurban driving cycle to show that the proposed sensor FTC approach is effective and provides a simple configuration with high performance in terms of speed and torque responses.