  This article explores the optimization of plant characteristics and
controller parameters for electrified mobility. Electrification of mobile
transportation systems, such as automobiles and aircraft, presents the ability
to improve key performance metrics such as efficiency and cost. However, the
strong bidirectional coupling between electrical and thermal dynamics within
new components creates integration challenges, increasing component degradation
and reducing performance. Diminishing these issues requires novel plant designs
and control strategies. The electrified mobility literature provides prior
studies on plant and controller optimization, known as control co-design (CCD).
A void within these studies is the lack of model predictive control (MPC),
recognized to manage multi-domain dynamics for electrified systems, within CCD
frameworks. This article addresses this through three contributions. First, a
thermo-electro-mechanical hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) model is developed that
is suitable for both plant optimization and MPC. Second, simultaneous plant and
controller optimization is performed for this multi-domain system. Third, MPC
is integrated within a CCD framework using the candidate HEV model. Results
indicate that optimizing both the plant and MPC parameters simultaneously can
reduce physical component sizes by over 60% and key performance metric errors
by over 50%.
