Comparison of Transmission Control Algorithms for Automated Vehicles

The number of gears in a transmission system has increased significantly in the last decades, in order to always keep the engine in the optimal operating point, whether the vehicle is accelerating, decelerating or traveling with constant velocity. Several transmission control algorithms have been developed for road vehicles equipped with Automated Manual Transmission (AMT) or Automatic Transmission (AT) in order to find out and serve the drivers will and choose gear according to the actual driving status. The aim of this work is to investigate different gear shifting strategies, and to compare them in various aspects in simulation environment and tests including a real vehicle. When selecting the appropriate gear in the transmission, a number of parameters can be taken into consideration, e.g. actual engine speed, actual engine torque, fuel consumption, acceleration pedal position and the speed of the position change (position derivative), etc. To consider all of these parameters four gear selection algorithms have been implemented and tested.