The research field "Model-based Engine Calibration" at the Institute of Automatic Control deals with the development and improvement of methods for the task of engine calibration.
A modern combustion engine is controlled by an Engine Control Unit (ECU). The engine maps which are stored on the ECU have to be defined in a calibration process, which in previous times was performed manually from an engineer at the test bed. Since the legislative restrictions, like exhaust-gas thresholds, and the requirements of customers, like low fuel consumption, are permanently increasing, more and more new systems had to be introduced for a better controlling of the combustion process. This caused the number of actuators in modern combustion engines to increase in the last years. Since all dependencies of all actuators have to be considered, the task of calibration results in a high-dimensional problem, which makes it difficult to find the optimal settings for the combustion engine.
Due to the increased complexity todays calibration engineers need to be supported by modern methods. The research area of model-based engine calibration deals with the development and improvement of these methods.