This paper presents a new control method designed to improve vehicle drivability on downhill grades. Vehicles normally gain speed when traveling downhill regardless of the driver's desire not to accelerate. Drivers often shift into a lower gear to reduce the vehicle speed. With the control method described here, the shifting operation is executed automatically by using a driver's mental model to infer the intention to decelerate. The driver's mental model is identified by applying InteractiveDichotomizer 3 to obtain the inductive relationship between the vehicle operating data and the driver's intention. An examination was made of the timing difference between automated shifting and manual shifting by the driver. The results indicate that anautomatic gear shift performed by the controller should be finished before the driver forms an intention to shift gears. The results of this study verify the effectiveness of factoring the inference of the driver's intentions into power train controlsystems.
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