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To cite this article: Ka In Wong, Pak Kin Wong & Chun Shun Cheung (2015) Modelling and Prediction of Diesel
Engine Performance using Relevance Vector Machine, International Journal of Green Energy, 12:3, 265-271, DOI:
10.1080/15435075.2014.891513
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International Journal of Green Energy (2015) 12, 265–271
Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC
ISSN: 1543-5075 print / 1543-5083 online
DOI: 10.1080/15435075.2014.891513
Diesel engines are being increasingly adopted by many car manufacturers today, yet no exact mathematical diesel engine model exists due
to its highly nonlinear nature. In the current literature, black-box identification has been widely used for diesel engine modelling and many
artificial neural network (ANN) based models have been developed. However, ANN has many drawbacks such as multiple local minima,
user burden on selection of optimal network structure, large training data size, and over-fitting risk. To overcome these drawbacks, this
article proposes to apply an emerging machine learning technique, relevance vector machine (RVM), to model and predict the diesel engine
performance. The property of global optimal solution of RVM allows the model to be trained using only a few experimental data sets. In this
study, the inputs of the model are engine speed, load, and cooling water temperature, while the output parameters are the brake-specific
fuel consumption and the amount of exhaust emissions like nitrogen oxides and carbon dioxide. Experimental results show that the model
accuracy is satisfactory even the training data is scarce. Moreover, the model accuracy is compared with that using typical ANN. Evaluation
results also show that RVM is superior to typical ANN approach.
Keywords: Diesel engine modelling, Engine performance, Artificial neural network, Relevance vector machine, Data scarcity
Table 1. Engine specifications From the experiments, only 22 sets of data corresponding to
different engine speeds and torque were collected. From the view
Model Isuzu 4HF1 point of the machine learning approaches, 22 sets are considered
Type In-line four-cylinder as scarce. This problem of scarce data set is always encountered
Maximum power 88 kW/3200 rpm in small-scale test laboratories. The collected sampling data,
Maximum torque 285 Nm/1800 rpm including the BSFC, CO2 , and NOx emissions, corresponding to
Bore × stroke 112 mm × 110 mm different load and speed settings, are summarized in Table 3.
Displacement 4334 cc
Compression ratio 19.0:1
Diesel Engine Modelling
Fuel injection timing (BTDC) 8◦
Injection pump type Bosch in-line type
Injection nozzle Hole type (with five Model Parameters
orifices) Before constructing the diesel engine model, the input and out-
put parameters must be defined in advance. Since 22 data sets
were collected from the experiments, to separate them, 18 of
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them were used as the training data for the model construction,
Dynamometer Eddy-current Data acquisition
control system dynamometer system
and the rest of 4 sets were used as testing data for model evalu-
ation. The two controllable parameters, engine speed and engine
load, are selected as the input parameters. The cooling water gov-
Exhaust erns the engine temperature, so the cooling water temperature is
gases
Diesel engine Gas analyzers considered as an important factor and thus it is treated as the
input parameter in this study too. For the output parameters, the
measured data like BSFC, CO2 and NOx emissions are chosen.
Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of experimental setup.
engine speed BSFC
i.e., x = engine torque ,y= CO2 (1)
speed and torque. Ultra-low sulfur diesel fuel containing less coolant temperature NOx
than 10-ppm-wt sulfur was used for data sampling. Anapol
EU5000 exhaust gas analyzer was used to measure the gaseous
Modelling Using RVM
species in the engine exhaust on a continuous basis. It used infra-
sensors for measuring CO2 concentrations and used chemical According to the theory of RVM (Tipping 2001; Tipping and Faul
cells for measuring nitrogen monoxide (NO) and nitrogen diox- 2003), the diesel engine model can be approximated by Eq. (2):
ide (NO2 ) to obtain the NOx concentration. The gas analyzer was
calibrated with standard and zero gases before each experiment.
N
The resolution of the equipment is summarized in Table 2. Y = w0 + wk K (X, xk ) = wφ (X) (2)
The experiments were conducted at engine speeds of 1200, k=1
1400, 1600, 1800, and 2000 rpm, and each at engine torque of 28,
70, 140, 210, and 252 Nm. At each speed and torque, data were where Y is the prediction output of the RVM model for
recorded after the engine had reached the steady state, which was the unseen input data X, xk is the kth input vector of the
indicated by the lubricating oil temperature and the cooling water training data sets, w = [w0 , . . . , wN ] is the weight vector of
temperature. For the purpose of reducing experimental uncertain- the RVM model, K(X, xk ) is the kernel function and φ(X) =
ties, the data were recorded continuously for 5 min and each test [1, K(X, x1 ), . . . , K(X, xN )]T . Gaussian radial basis function was
was carried out three times and the average values were used. selected as the kernel function because it can easily fit scattered
Besides, in each test, the volumetric flow rate of fuel was mea- and highly nonlinear behavior and usually outperforms other
sured using a measuring cylinder and then converted into mass mapping in regression problem domain (Seeger 2004):
consumption rate based on the density of the fuel (i.e., fuel flow
rate). The BSFC was then derived based on the engine speed, X − x2k
K (X, xk ) = exp − . (3)
engine torque and fuel flow rate. σ2
N
In order to construct an accurate model, the weight vec- X − x2k
tor in Eq. (2) and the basis width (σ ) of the kernel function Y = μ0 + μk exp − . (6)
k=1
σ2
need to be well estimated. In the RVM algorithm, this can
be done by firstly determining the hyperparameter vector α =
[α0 , . . . , αN ] through the maximization of the likelihood function From the above RVM algorithm, only the value of the basis
as formulated by Eq. (4). width σ need to be defined by the user. In this study, this σ
value is tuned by using leave-one-out cross-validation, which is
1 a well-known validation scheme specifically suitable for scarce
L(α) = − N log 2π + log σ 2 I + φAφ T
2 dataset.
(4)
−1 Before training the RVM model, each input and output value,
+ yT σ 2 I + φAφ T y say v, in the data sets was normalized according to the proce-
dure in (Pyle 1999) in order to increase the model accuracy and
prevent any parameter from dominating the output values. The
where A is defined as diag (α 0 , . . . , α N ), and y is the output
normalization range is [0, +1], which can be done using Eq. (7).
vector of the training data sets.
The maximization of Eq. (4) over α is known as the type-II
maximum likelihood procedure, which can be accelerated using (v − vmin )
N(v) = v∗ (7)
the strategy in (Tipping and Faul 2003), where an empty model is (vmax − vmin )
first initialized and then samples within the same principal frame-
work are sequentially added or deleted to increase the marginal
likelihood. After the most probable α is generated from the where v∗ , vmax and vmin are the normalized parameter, the upper
procedure, it is then put into Eq. (5) to evaluate the posterior limit of the input/output parameter before normalization and the
mean μ: lower limit of the input/output parameter before normalization,
respectively. After the model is trained, the output values pre-
−1 dicted by the model need to be de-normalized using the inverse
μ = σ −2 A + σ −2 φ T φ φ T y. (5) of Eq. (7) to obtain the actual values.
The above RVM modelling algorithm, including the vali-
The posterior mean μ calculated from Eq. (5), which consists dation and the normalization scheme, was implemented using
of very few non-zero elements (i.e., highly sparse), is used as MATLAB R2012a and executed under Windows 7 on a computer
the estimation of the weight vector. As a result, the RVM diesel with Intel Core i7 processor and 6 GB RAM onboard to build the
engine model can be further defined as: diesel engine model.
Diesel Engine Performance 269
Model Evaluation Table 4, which is very similar to those ANN structure proposed
by other researchers.
To illustrate the performance of the RVM model, the model pre-
The RMSE and R2 for the prediction results of both the
dicted output values are compared with the actual values from
RVM model and ANN model are summarized in Table 5.
the experimental data sets (i.e., desired values). Two performance
To make the modelling results more readable, Figures 3–5
indices, namely root mean square error (RMSE) and the coeffi-
depict the comparison between the models’ predicted values
cient of determination (R2 ), are used to evaluate the model, which
and the desire values. By comparing the modelling results in
can be calculated using Eqs. (8) and (9).
the figures, one can learn that RVM is, obviously, superior to
ANN, and that the RVM diesel engine model constructed is
1 N
reliable.
RMSE = (yk − Yk )2 (8)
N k=1
Discussion of the Modelling Results
N
1 From Table 5, it can be seen that RVM outperforms the ANN
2 Nt
[yk − Yk ]
R2 = 1 − k=1 2
, where y = yk (9) by 38.32% in RMSEtrain , 20.83% in RMSEtest , 16.41% in R2 train ,
N
(yk − ȳ) N k=1 and 31.40% in R2 test . The relatively high RMSEtrain of the ANN
Downloaded by [University of Macau Library] at 19:11 27 October 2014
k=1
shows that the data sets are not sufficient for building such a
In Eqs. (8) and (9), YK is the k th model predicted value, yk highly-nonlinear model. This agrees with the previous studies
is the desired value corresponding to the inputs that give Yk , ȳ that ANN usually requires a large sample data size to train an
is the mean of the desired values, and N is the number of data accurate model. Moreover, RVM attempts to optimize ‘global’
points. It has to be noticed that, a smaller RMSE means a better parameters, whereas ANN easily stuck in local minima. Hence,
model accuracy, whereas a higher R2 means the better the model the prediction result of ANN is worse than RVM. Furthermore,
performs in prediction. only one parameter, σ , needs to be tuned by the user for RVM,
Moreover, for comparison purpose, another diesel engine while the learning rate, number of hidden layers and number
model was constructed using a multilayer feed-forward ANN of hidden neurons are required in ANN, which means a grid
with back-propagation based on the same sampling data sets. of guessed values for these parameters have to be prepared and
Since multilayer feed-forward neural network is a well-known examined.
universal estimator (Bishop 1995) and many researches for diesel The RMSEs of both RVM and ANN for predicting the BSFC
engine modelling (Traver, Atkinson, and Atkinson 1999; Khalil are relatively large as compared to the other output parame-
et al. 2005; Canakci, Erdil, and Arcaklioglu 2006; Najafi et al. ters. This is because the function of BSFC is extremely com-
2007; Ghobadian et al. 2009; Oguz, Saritas, and Baydan 2010; plicated, only 18 training data sets are insufficient for both
Yusaf, Yousif, and Elawad 2011; Aydogan, Altun, and Ozcelik modelling algorithms, but it is believed that the model accu-
2011; Ozgur et al. 2011; Ismail et al. 2012) were done based on racies can be improved by increasing the number of training
this configuration, the results from it can be considered as a rather data. Overall, the prediction accuracy of RVM for scarce data is
standard benchmark. The structure of the ANN used is listed in satisfactory.
Table 5. Prediction results of the RVM model and the ANN model
Output parameters Model RMSEtrain ∗ RMSEtest ∗ R2 train R2 test
700 1200
500 800
300 400
RVM ANN
RVM ANN
0
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15 the average accuracy of the RVM model is higher than that of the
ANN model, implying that RVM is superior to the ANN.
With the diesel engine model constructed by RVM, experi-
mental efforts can be reduced significantly as the performance
Predicted value of CO2 (%)
In this study, RVM has been applied to model the diesel engine Funding
performance and emission characteristics under the condition
of data scarcity. Although the combustion process of the diesel The research is supported by the University of Macau Research
engine is unknown, the RVM model has successfully demon- Grant, grant numbers MYRG149(Y2-L2)-FST11-WPK and
strated the relation between the input parameters, namely the MYRG2014-00178-FST, and the short-term visiting scholar pro-
engine speeds, engine loads and cooling water temperature, and gramme of University of Macau.
the output variables, including the BSFC, CO2 , and NOx concen-
trations. Experimental results show that the RVM model is still
satisfactory even the available data sets are very few. It is believed Nomenclature
that more training data sets can improve the model accuracy.
Furthermore, a comparison between the RVM model and an ANN Artificial neural network
ANN model has also been conducted. The results indicate that BPNN Back-propagation neural network
Diesel Engine Performance 271
BSFC Brake-specific fuel consumption Khalil, A., M.N. Almasri, M. McKee, and J.J. Kaluarachchi. 2005.
CO2 Carbon dioxide Applicability of statistical learning algorithms in groundwater quality
NOx Nitrogen oxides modeling. Water Resources Research no. 41 (5).
Lim, S.S., T. Vos, A.D. Flaxman, et al. 2012. A comparative risk assess-
RBFNN Radial basis function neural network
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RMSE Root mean square error and risk factor clusters in 21 regions, 1990–2010: A systematic analy-
RMSEtest Root mean square error for testing data sis for the Global Burden of Disease Study 2010. The Lancet no. 380
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