Abstract
The three papers in part 1 of this special issue are derived from the presentations from the InstMC Mini-Symposium at Control 2012, held at Cardiff in September 2012. The symposium was successful in attracting a mix of papers drawn from industry and academia with a lively audience participating fully in the question and answer sessions. The event was extremely well attended, and this issue attempts to recapture the atmosphere of the day.
The first paper by Dr Paul King of Jaguar Land Rover is concerned with on-board diagnostics and the use of confidence limits to set thresholds. The paper describes the ongoing work regarding the vehicle manufacturers’ activities in ensuring that on-board sensor systems for emissions are appropriately tuned to minimise the occurrence of false alarms, yet complying with the ever stringent legislation. This problem is heightened by the fact that there is a paucity of data corresponding to failure scenarios.
The second paper by Ian Cunningham of Vector GB presents a novel idea in the form of a fuzzy transform. The motivation of the paper is driven by the desire to address the notion of range anxiety of drivers of electric vehicles. The use of the fuzzy transform in this context results in effective data compression and data filtering properties and, in conjunction with two coupled recursive least squares algorithms, is able to estimate/predict the battery state of charge, hence distance (range) remaining.
The third paper by Dr Selim Oleksowicz et al. of the Control Theory and Applications Centre, Coventry University, deals with the legal and safety challenges of regenerative braking control strategies associated with hybrid/electric vehicles (H/EVs). It is stated that the control strategies for H/EVs are required to comply with tighter legislation than conventionally propelled non-H/EVs. While there are numerous safety-related and legislative challenges to overcome, the field is rich for research in terms of engineering analysis and control system design.