The award, which recognizes outstanding contributions to control systems technology, was awarded to the development team of engineers: David Germann, Dejan Kihas, Daniel Pachner, Jaroslav Pekar, Greg Stewart, and Francesco Borrelli, who is now an associate professor of mechanical engineering at the University of California-Berkeley. Kihas and Borrelli accepted the award on behalf of the team at IEEE’s Conference on Decision Control held 10-13 December in Maui, Hawaii.

Ever-tightening emissions legislation is driving increasing numbers of sensors, actuators, and lines of software code into modern engines. The design of the computer-based control system to coordinate all of this complexity has become a significant bottleneck for engine makers.

Honeywell released the diesel engine version of OnRAMP Design Suite in October 2011 to simplify the control development process. The systematic approach provided by OnRAMP automates many of the manual processes that are typically used by manufacturers, thus significantly reducing development time and costs.

The OnRAMP control development methodology allows the application of advanced multi-variable model-based control to improve engine performance. With a fraction of the time and effort, OEMs can generate a fully transient control that better manages engine variability and improves overall engine performance, including emissions and fuel consumption.

OnRAMP has been used to complete development projects with OEMs such as Cummins, Daimler, MAN, Ford and others. Honeywell is currently expanding the OnRAMP portfolio to include Diesel After-Treatment systems and Gasoline Engines.

This is the third time that Honeywell has received the IEEE Control Systems Technology Award since 2002. Honeywell Corporate Fellow Tariq Samad won the award in 2008 for his technology development and commercialization work across the process industries, aerospace vehicles, building automation and automotive power trains; and Stewart won it in 2002 for his work on advanced controls for papermaking machines. Honeywell is the only company to have won the award three times.