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To meet the ever increasing requirements for engines and vehicles in the areas of performance, fuel economy, emission, and meanwhile reduce product development time, Hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation is increasingly used in automotive control system development. Engine-in-the-loop (EIL) vehicle simulation, which is a specific form of HIL simulation, is an approach in which a physical engine (together with its control unit) is coupled to virtual vehicle and driver models through a high power, low inertia engine dynamometer in the engine test cell environment. EIL can be used to perform powertrain control development, as well as engine and vehicle performance evaluation. Because of its advantages in repeatability and flexibility etc., especially for transient operating mode study, EIL has become a powerful tool and will be more widely used in the near future. Design and implementation of an EIL vehicle simulation system is described.

Engine Electronic Throttle Control (ETC) systems are gaining success in high volume applications. This system helps to improve overall engine and vehicle performance, as well as facilitate the function integration of related control features. The requirement for an ETC system is that it fulfills the commanded throttle plate opening as quickly and accurately as possible. Because of nonlinearity of the electronic throttle system, gain-scheduled control is often used. A method to automatically tune the control for each operating region is needed. In this paper the engine electronic throttle is considered as having dominant linear dynamics for each operating region. A Two-Degree-of-Freedom (2-DOF) PID controller and a method of using Model Reference Adaptive Control (MRAC) algorithm to automatically tune the PID control gains are designed.