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In diesel engines with EGR and VGT, the gas flow dynamics has significant nonlinear effects. This is shown by analyzing DC-gains in different operating points showing that these gains have large variations. To handle these nonlinear effects, a nonlinear state dependent input transformation is investigated. This input transformation is achieved through inversion of the models for EGR-flow and turbine flow. It is shown that the input transformation handles the nonlinear effects and decreases the variations in DC-gains substantially. The input transformation is combined with a new control structure that has a pumping work minimization feature and consists of PID controllers and min/max-selectors for coordinated control of EGR-fraction and oxygen/fuel ratio. The EGR flow and the exhaust manifold pressure are chosen as feedback variables in this structure. Further, the set-points for EGR-fraction and oxygen/fuel ratio are transformed to set-points for the feedback variables.

In modern Diesel engines Exhaust Gas Recirculation (EGR) and Variable Geometry Turbochargers (VGT) have been introduced to meet the new emission requirements. A control structure that coordinates and handles emission limits and low fuel consumption has been developed. This controller has a set of PID controllers with parameters that need to be tuned. To be able to achieve good performance, an optimization based tuning method is developed and tested. In the optimization the control objectives are captured by a cost function. To aid the tuning a systematic method has been developed for selecting representative and significant transients that excite different modes in the controller. The performance is evaluated on the European Transient Cycle. It is demonstrated how weighting factors in the cost function influence control behavior, and that the proposed tuning method gives a significant improvement in control performance compared to standardized tuning methods for PID controllers.