Abstract
This paper presents a new methodology for controlling vehicular powertrain systems such as an automatic transmission. It usually takes about 500 milliseconds to complete gear shift control after a driver shifts gears. The control system proposed here is designed to infer the driver's intention before the person executes a gear shift. Inputs to the system therefore include both shifting operations and the driver's intentions. The identification model for inferring the driver's intentions is the focus of this paper. Quantitative and qualitative input variables are estimated by interpretative structural modeling (ISM), and the model is divided into a quantitative submodel and a qualitative submodel. Special attention is given here to the former submodel. The production rules used to infer the driver's intention to decelerate are generated experimentally by the iterative dichotomizer 3 (ID3) method. A comparison is made with a conventional control system to show the performance improvements obtained with the proposed system. The results verify the effectiveness of factoring the inference of the driver's intentions into powertrain control systems.
