Driving Stability Coordinated Control for Distributed Drive Heavy-Duty Trucks after A Tire Blowout

This paper proposes a coordinated control strategy for distributed drive heavy-duty trucks to ensure driving stability after a tire blowout, with explicit consideration of the critical effect of vertical load redistribution. The strategy constructs a hierarchical control architecture, in which an upper-layer model predictive controller is designed to maintain vehicle stability and original lane keeping by generating virtual control signals for resultant yaw moment and longitudinal force. Meanwhile, a sliding mode controller is developed to regulate the longitudinal velocity, aiming to minimize dangerous speed fluctuations and reduce the risk of rear-end collisions on highways. To optimally distribute the resultant tire force and yaw moment to the individual in-wheel motors, a lower-layer torque allocator based on a reconfigurable constrained weighted least squares algorithm is designed. This allocator effectively accounts for the post-blowout vertical load transfer, actuator saturation, and other physical constraints. The effectiveness and robustness of the proposed integrated strategy are comprehensively validated through simulations conducted on Simulink-TruckSim co-simulation platform under various critical scenarios, including tire blowouts on straight roads, curved roads, and under different vertical load conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed controller can successfully stabilize the vehicle, maintain the intended path, and manage longitudinal speed effectively across all tested conditions, highlighting its practical potential for enhancing the safety of heavy-duty vehicles.