Model predictive control for three-axle trucks during tire blowout on expressway based on equivalent chassis

Unexpected tire blowout on expressway is one of the most dangerous scenarios for heavy load multi-axle trucks, especially under the inexperienced driver’s improper intervention. To this end, this paper proposes an autonomous tire blowout controller for three-axle trucks based on model predictive control (MPC) method. First of all, aiming at balancing the computing load and the path-tracking accuracy, an equivalent chassis is transformed based on the stable two-dimensional vehicle dynamic model. Second, a tire blowout–oriented vehicle high-fidelity dynamic model is established based on the equivalent chassis, in which the vehicle lateral, yaw, and roll motions are all considered at the same time. Then, an MPC-based dynamic control strategy is proposed to achieve effective tire blowout suppression with the consideration of vehicle rollover stability. Afterward, a transient vertical tire force shock is employed to simulate the real tire blowout behavior, on which two typical scenarios are constructed based on the TruckSim–Simulink co-simulation platform. The simulation results illustrate the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method. In two different dangerous tire blowout conditions, the lateral load transfer rate (LTR) value of the vehicle is reduced by 3.45% and 40.87%, respectively, while the trajectory tracking error is reduced at the same time.