Reliable Fault-tolerant Distributed Control for Traction IPMSM in Electric Vehicle/Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Electrical motors are used to provide traction power in electric/hybrid electric vehicles (EV/HEV). This paper introduces the concept of a distributed framework in which the task of traction drive control is shared between the local controllers. So, if one of the controllers is lost due to unforeseen circumstances such as faults, the neighboring agents can still drive the affected traction motor(s). Inverted-fed interior permanent magnet synchronous motors (IPMSM) are widely used for EV/HEV traction and are considered in a notional two-agent traction system case study. Each IPMSM controller includes a PI speed loop, a maximum torque per-ampere (MTPA) current reference generator, and space vector modulation (SVM) for inverter gate drive. The distributed framework generates global feedback variables between the neighboring agents to generate consensus input/output variables. Simulation results in the case study show promising reliability advantages in applying the proposed traction drive control framework.