In this paper we study the lateral motion control and torque allocation for four-wheel-independent-drive electric vehicles (4WID-EVs) with combined active front steering (AFS) and direct yaw moment control (DYC) through in-vehicle networks. It is well known that the in-vehicle networks and x-by-wire technologies have considerable advantages over the traditional point-to-point communications, and bring great strengths to 4WID-EVs. However, there are also bandwidth limitations which would lead to message time delays in network communication. We propose a method on effectively utilizing the limited bandwidth resources and attenuating the adverse influence of in-vehicle network-induced time delays, based on the idea of dynamic message priority assignment according to the vehicle states and control signals. Simulation results from a high-fidelity vehicle model in CarSim® show that the proposed vehicle lateral control and torque allocation algorithm can improve the 4WID-EV lateral motion control performance, and the proposed message priority dynamic assignment algorithm can significantly reduce the adverse influence of the in-vehicle network-induced time delays.
