Optimisation of Active Suspension Control Inputs for Improved Vehicle Handling Performance

Active suspension is commonly considered under the framework of vertical vehicle dynamics control aimed at improvements in ride comfort. This paper uses a collocation-type control variable optimization tool to investigate to which extent the fully active suspension (FAS) application can be broaden to the task of vehicle handling/cornering control. The optimization approach is firstly applied to solely FAS actuator configurations and three types of double lane change maneuvers. The obtained optimization results are used to gain insights into different control mechanisms that are used by FAS to improve the handling performance in terms of path following error reduction. For the same maneuvers the FAS performance is compared with the performance of different active steering and active differential actuators. The optimization study is finally extended to combined FAS and active front and/or rear steering configurations to investigate if they can use their complementary control authorities (over the vertical and lateral vehicle dynamics, respectively) to further improve the handling performance.