Toward hazard reduction of road vehicle after tire blowout: A driver steering assist control strategy

Tire blowout or failure of road vehicle on the expressway has greatly threaten the safety of the passengers and host vehicle as well as surrounding vehicles, and existing studies show that driver improper intervention after tire blowout is one of the principal causes that induce the serious traffic accidents. To such issue, this paper develops a hazard reduction oriented driver steering assist control strategy for road vehicle after tire blowout by introducing a hierarchical closed-loop control architecture for timely assisting driver. Within this strategy, a model predictive control based path tracking controller and an optimal preview acceleration driver model are separately developed for enhancing vehicle lateral stability after tire blowout based upon feedback vehicle attitude information in upper-level. As well, the parameterized driver activity is formulated considering his/her driving action and driving state, upon which a assist determination coefficient is further designed for adaptively allocating intervention level of assist controller. In lower-level, supported by reported burst tire mechanical characteristic and B-class vehicle model sourced from CarSim, a Simulink-CarSim co-simulation platform is constructed, in which tire vertical force redistributions after tire blowout are explicitly considered. In the end, simulations performed on the developed platform validate the effectiveness and efficiency of the assist steering control strategy and methods in improving directional stability and lateral dynamics performance of the vehicle after tire blowout.