Vehicles with different levels of autonomy in traffic have varying capabilities to sense their surroundings that affect the driving behaviour and the vehicle’s motion. Understanding the dynamics of the vehicular systems and subsystems is essential to determine the effects of driving autonomy on vehicle mobility in traffic.



We focus on internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles, where electronically actuated systems provide an opportunity for introducing SAE J3016 Standard Level 3 driving autonomy. Vehicle models that capture both transient and steady-state characteristics of all the vehicular systems are necessary for developing such autonomous controllers. We consider an ICE powertrain with a push belt type continuous variable transmission (CVT) associated with a double pinion planetary gear set for Drive-Neutral-Reverse operation.



We propose novel models for the planetary gear and the CVT as differential-equation-algebraic (DAE) systems. We combine these models with existing models of powertrain components and vehicle dynamics to study the utility of the proposed models. We consider three case study examples with realistic scenarios to examine the models’ ability to capture transient and steady-state characteristics and compare the resulting behaviour with the expected response.