The broad aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive coverage of the modelling and optimal control of both two‐ and four‐wheeled road vehicles. The first focus of this book is a review of classical mechanics and its use in building vehicle and tyre dynamic models. The second is nonlinear optimal control, which is used to solve a range of minimum‐time, minimum‐fuel, and track curvature reconstruction problems. As is known classically, all thismaterial is bound together by the calculus of variations and stationary principles. The treatment of this material is supplemented with a large number of examples that highlight obscurities and subtleties in the theory. A particular strength of the book is its unified treatment of tyre, car, and motorcycle dynamics and the application of nonlinear optimal control to vehicle‐related problems within a single text. These topics are usually treated independently, and can only be found in disparate texts and journal articles. It is our contention that presentday vehicle dynamicists should be familiar with all of these topic areas. The aim in writing this book is to provide a comprehensive and yet accessible text that emphasizes particularly the theoretical aspects of vehicular modelling and control.

This paper investigates the minimum time/limit handling car manoeuvring through nonlinear optimal control techniques. The resulting ‘optimal driver’ controls the car at its physical limits. The focus is on cornering: different road surfaces (dry and wet paved road, dirt and gravel off-road) and transmission layouts (rear-wheel-drive, front-wheel-drive and all-wheel-drive) are considered. Low-drift paved circuit-like manoeuvres and aggressive/high-drift even counter-steering rally like manoeuvres are found depending on terrain/layout combinations. The results shed a light on the optimality of limit handling techniques.

Minimum lap time simulations are especially important in the design, optimisation and setup of race vehicles. Such problems usually come in different flavours, e.g. quasi-steady state models vs. full dynamic models and pre-defined (fixed) trajectory problems vs. free trajectory problems. This work is focused on full dynamic models with free trajectory. Practical solution techniques include direct methods (i.e. solution of an nonlinear programming problem problem, widespread approach) and indirect method (i.e. based on Pontryagin's principle, less common, yet quite efficient in some cases). In this contribution the performance of the direct and indirect methods are compared in a number of vehicle-related problems.

Objective: Active safety systems, of which antilock braking is a prominent example, are going to play an important role to improve powered two-wheeler (PTW) safety. This paper presents a systematic review of the scientific literature on active safety for PTWs. The aim was to list all systems under development, identify knowledge gaps and recognize promising research areas that require further efforts. Methods: A broad search using “safety” as the main keyword was performed on Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar, followed by manual screening to identify eligible papers that underwent a full-text review. Finally, the selected papers were grouped by general technology type and analyzed via structured form to identify the following: specific active safety system, study type, outcome type, population/sample where applicable, and overall findings. Results: Of the 8,000 papers identified with the initial search, 85 were selected for full-text review and 62 were finally included in the study, of which 34 were journal papers. The general technology types identified included antilock braking system, autonomous emergency braking, collision avoidance, intersection support, intelligent transportation systems, curve warning, human machine interface systems, stability control, traction control, and vision assistance. Approximately one third of the studies considered the design and early stage testing of safety systems (n. 22); almost one fourth (n.15) included evaluations of system effectiveness. Conclusions: Our systematic review shows that a multiplicity of active safety systems for PTWs were examined in the scientific literature, but the levels of development are diverse. A few systems are currently available in the series production, whereas other systems are still at the level of early-stage prototypes. Safety benefit assessments were conducted for single systems, however, organized comparisons between systems that may inform the prioritization of future research are lacking. Another area of future analysis is on the combined effects of different safety systems, that may be capitalized for better performance and to maximize the safety impact of new technologies.

Minimum lap time problems are usually solved employing quasi-steady-state models on a predetermined (fixed) trajectory or employing dynamic models on a free (i.e. not predetermined) trajectory. This work describes a third approach, where the minimum-lap-time problem is solved using quasi-steady-state models and free trajectory. The method builds upon g-g maps that can either be derived numerically or experimentally. Such g-g-speed surfaces can either represent the performance of a car or a motorcycle. Both a double-track car model and a motorcycle model are employed as examples of applications. The effect of the free-trajectory vs. fixed-trajectory assumption is also discussed.