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Characterizing or reconstructing incidents ranging from light to heavy crashes is one of the enablers for mobility solutions for fleet management, car-sharing, ride-hailing, insurance etc. While crashes involving airbag deployment are noticeable, light crashes without airbag deployment can be hidden and most drivers do not report these incidents. In this paper, we are using vehicle responses together with a dynamics model to trace back if abnormal forces have been applied to a vehicle so as to detect light crashes. The crash location around the perimeter of the vehicle, the direction of the crash force, and the severity of the crashes are all determined in real-time based on on-board sensor measurements which has further application in accident reconstruction. All of this information will be integrated to a feature called “Incident Report”, which enable reporting of minor accidents to the relevant entities such as insurance agencies, fleet managements, etc.

This paper proposes an approach that uses the road preview data to optimize a shift schedule for a vehicle equipped with an automatic transmission. The road preview is inferred here from the so-called electronic horizon of a digital map that includes road attributes such as road grade, curvature, segment speed limit, functional class, etc. The optimized shift schedule selects the gear ratio whose optimization is conducted through applying a hybrid model predictive control method to the powertrain system, which is modelled as the multiple plants associated with multiple gears together with engine models. The goal of this optimization of shift schedule includes improving real world fuel economy and drivability. The real-world fuel economy gains using the proposed approach are achieved through optimizing gear ratio w.r.t. the road grade variations of the road ahead.

This paper proposes a method to enhance existing electronic stability control systems such that a certain level of rollover mitigation performance is achieved. Such an enhancement is conducted through a control algorithm using only the standard ESC sensors. The analysis presented here reveals that a rollover mitigation system such as this will face a trade-off between the vehicle's responsiveness and the control robustness due to error in the roll dynamics model and state estimation.