OPTIMAL TEMPERATURE AND FLOW CONTROL AND ESTIMATION IN THERMAL SYSTEM MANAGEMENT FOR ELECTRIFIED VEHICLES

An optimal control method for a vehicle thermal system includes providing a set of sensors configured to measure a set of operating parameters of the thermal system and a set of actuators configured to control flow and temperature of a coolant through the thermal system and performing, by a vehicle controller, linear-quadratic-Gaussian (LQG) optimal control of the thermal system by generating, using the set of sensors and the set of actuators and a sampling time, inputs for a state-space model of the thermal system, identifying the state-space model of the thermal system using a sub-space method, obtaining a Kalman filter to estimate states of the state-space model at each sampling time, calculating flows through the thermal system using the estimated states and diagonal matrix properties, and applying an optimal control to compute a gain and values of each of the set of actuators at each sampling time.