Vehicle Cabin Climate MPC Parameter Tuning Using Constrained Contextual Bayesian Optimization (C-CMES)

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Bayesian optimization-based method for tuning vehicle cabin climate control MPCs, resulting in robust, disturbance-rejecting policies that adapt to varying blower mass flows and improve control performance.

Contribution

It presents a new automatic tuning approach using constrained contextual Bayesian optimization for multi-zone vehicle climate MPCs, enhancing robustness and adaptability.

Findings

Mass flow-dependent policies outperform constant parametrizations.

Robust tuning reduces worst-case overshoot.

Consistent control behavior under varying conditions.

Abstract

Climate-controlled cabins have for decades been standard in vehicles. Model Predictive Controllers (MPCs) have shown promising results in achieving temperature tracking in vehicle cabins and may improve upon model-free control performance. However, for the multi-zone climate control case, proper controller tuning is challenging, as externally, e.g., passenger-triggered changes in compressor setting and thus mass flow lead to degraded control performance. This paper presents a tuning method to automatically determine robust MPC parameters, as a function of the blower mass flow. Constrained contextual Bayesian optimization (BO) is used to derive policies minimizing a high-level cost function subject to constraints in a defined scenario. The proposed method leverages random disturbances and model-plant mismatch within the training episodes to generate controller parameters achieving robust disturbance rejection. The method contains a postprocessing step to achieve smooth policies that can be utilized in real-world applications. First, simulation results show that the mass flow-dependent policy outperforms a constant parametrization, while achieving the desired closed-loop behavior. Second, the robust tuning method greatly reduces worst-case overshoot and produces consistent closed-loop behavior under varying operating conditions.