Reza Kazemi, Mohsen Raf’at, and Amir Reza noruzi
Deptartement of Mechanical Engineering, K. N. Toosi University of Technology, Tehran P.O. Box 19395-1999, Iran
Correspondence should be addressed to Reza Kazemi; kazemi@kntu.ac.ir
Received 31 May 2013; Accepted 14 July 2013; Published 1 January 2014
Academic Editors: A. Lidozzi and D. Sanders
Copyright © 2014 Reza Kazemi et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Optimization of gear ratio with the objectives of fuel consumption reduction and vehicle longitudinal performance improvement
has been the subject of many studies for years. Finding a strategy for changing gears with specific control objectives, especially in
the design of vehicles equipped with Continuously Variable Transition system (CVT), which has advantage of arbitrary selection
of gear ratio, has been the aim of some recent researches. Optimal control theory has rarely been used in the previous control
approaches applied to such systems due to the limitations in the use of fast computational systems. The aim of this study is to
design the aforementioned gear ratio change strategy and related control rules on the basis of optimal control. A driver model is
also designed for the simulation of driving cycle usingMATLAB Simulink Toolbar. Results of implementing optimal control rules
in vehicle longitudinal movement simulation with the aim of fuel consumption reduction are finally represented. The presented
method has the remarkable advantage of considerable fuel consumption reduction in comparison to other proposed approaches
for gear ratio change strategies.