Research ArticleIntelligent modified internal model control for speed control of nonlinear uncertain heavy duty vehicles

•The effectiveness of the proposed modified IMC over conventional IMC.•Design of optimized modified IMC technique with fuzzy supervisor.•Design of suitable internal model.•A comparative performance analysis is carried out.

The objective of this paper is to control the speed of heavy duty vehicle (HDV) through angular position of throttle valve. Modified internal model control (IMC) schemes with fuzzy supervisor as an adaptive tuning are proposed to control the speed of HDV. Internal model (IM) plays a key role in design of various IMC structures with robust and adaptive features. The motivation to design an IM is to produce nearly stable performance as of the system itself. Clustering algorithm and Hankel approximation based model order reduction techniques are used for the design of suitable IM. The time domain performance specifications such as overshoot, settling time, rise time and integral error performance indices such as the integral of the absolute error and the integral of the square of error are taken into consideration for performance analysis of HDV for various uncertainties.