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Ford Motor Company has developed a full hybrid electric vehicle with a power-split hybrid powertrain. There are constraints imposed by the high voltage system in such an HEV, that do not exist in conventional vehicles. A significant controls problem that was addressed in the Ford Escape and Mercury Mariner Hybrids was the determination of the desired powertrain operating point such that the vehicle attributes of fuel economy, performance and drivability are met, while satisfying these new constraints. This paper describes the control system that addressed this problem and the tests that were designed to verify its operation.

With the introduction of new technologies ranging from developing new alternative energy vehicles to passive and active safety systems, the automakers are responding to the increased complexity of the control system by embracing Model Based Design (MBD) and Auto-code Generation (ACG) tools for control system design. This translates into lower development costs, higher quality and faster time-to-market. The Ford Motor Company production hybrid group launched a pilot project to study the feasibility of using MBD to speed up the development and testing of the next generation Torque Monitor software. This software uses a custom data storage format, called Double Store Variable (DSV) format, for all the critical signals. Each variable contains two fields, one for storing the actual data and the second for storing a transformed copy (e.g. one's complement) of the data. This allows the software to detect run-time corruption of the data in real-time.

Plugin Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEV) have a large battery which can be used for electric only powertrain operation. The control system in a PHEV must decide how to spend the energy stored in the battery. In this paper, we will present a prototype implementation of a PHEV control system which saves energy for electric operation in pre-defined geographic areas, so called Green Zones. The approach determines where the driver will be going and then compares the route to a database of predefined Green Zones. The control system then reserves enough energy to be able to drive the Green Zone sections in electric only mode. Finally, the powertrain operation is modified once the vehicle enters the Green Zone to ensure engine operation is limited. Data will be presented from a prototype implementation in a Ford Escape PHEV

Recent events in the world have refocused auto manufacturers to design and produce more fuel efficient and environmentally friendly vehicles. One method to improve the fuel efficiency of vehicles is the hybridization of the vehicle's powertrain. Ford Motor Company is developing a hybrid electric powertrain for the Escape SUV. To quickly develop a control system to smoothly manage two propulsion systems as if it were a conventional powertrain is a difficult challenge. To meet that challenge, extensive use of Computer Aided Engineering simulation and analysis is necessary to quickly design, develop and verify control algorithms ready for production. This paper will present the design and development methodology for the production control algorithms to seamlessly move from the simulation environment to the embedded microcontroller.

Ford Motor Company has developed an Integrated Modeling Environment (IME) for hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) control system development. This paper presents the Integrated Modeling Environment which facilitates the design and development methodology for the production control algorithms to seamlessly move from simulation to the embedded microcontroller environment. The IME encompasses requirement management, system analysis and verification testing at multiple levels of the Systems Engineering V. In addition, the application of this environment for developing HEV control system (production algorithms and code) is also presented.