An integrated strategy for the control of a full vehicle active suspension system.

This paper presents a new methodology for subsystem integration in dynamic control systems. Based on deterministic optimal control concepts, the method relies on a policy of distributed design, using simplified subsystem models, and centralised control which may employ realtime optimisation of a composite Hamiltonian function. The application presented is that of a full-vehicle active suspension system controlling body pitch and roll attitude angles, as well as primary and secondary suspension variables and body bounce accelerations. Benefits of the approach include an inherent flexibility at the design stage, and significant performance improvement over that achieved by isolated subsystem control synthesis. Fault tolerance is also improved by the integrated strategy. (A)