Optimal control of articulated vehicles for tyre wear minimisation

Sammanfattning: Tyre wear is a significant problem on today's road vehicles, particularly for heavy trucks. As the tyre wears, microplastics is released in the air causing long term health issues and environmental pollution. With the introduction of automated vehicles there is a big potential to improve tyre wear of heavy trucks. In this direction, this thesis investigates the fundamentals of motion planning for minimising the lateral tyre wear in cornering for automated articulated vehicles. The trade-off between journey time and tyre wear is analysed. For the simulations, firstly an articulated vehicle model is used from the literature and validated with IPG/TruckMaker. Secondly, a sensitivity analysis is conducted on the articulated vehicle on a couple of parameters. The front cornering stiffness, hitch point, trailer mass and trailer centre of gravity position where the parameters influence on tyre wear is analysed. The results showed that moving the hitch point forward decreases the total tyre wear, increasing mass of the trailer increases tyre wear while the front cornering stiffness and centre of gravity position of the trailer did low to no difference to the total tyre wear. Then, an optimal control problem was configured to investigate the motion planning of an articulated vehicle. Then, the motion planning system is configured to find an optimal feasible trajectory with respect to dynamic and path constraints for the articulated vehicle to minimise lateral wear at a predefined path for fixed journey times. Four case different configurations of the problem are investigated to study the influence of driving style, lateral manoeuvrability allowance, vehicle acceleration capabilities and of the number of steering axles on the tractor. The results showed that motion planning can be used for minimising lateral tyre wear. The case study with largest impact on tyre wear was driving style, where the tyre wear showed significant difference between slow driving and aggressive driving. The second case study showed that wider lateral allowance led to less tyre wear and increasing the acceleration capabilities also decreases lateral tyre wear. The additional steering axle on the truck decreased tyre wear at higher velocities but for lower velocities the difference was negligible.