Modeling and Calibration of a Multi-Temperature Cargo for Trailer

This article describes development of a physics-based model of an insulated cargo box with three separate zones in Modelica. Due to a combination of a lack of proprietary or measured value and the assumptions used for modeling, a set of 10 unknown parameters needs to be calibrated using dynamic test data for accurate predictions. This calibration is posed as a dynamic optimization problem and the performance of multiple global optimization algorithms is compared. To speed up the optimization, surrogate assisted algorithms are also used and found to provide significant boost in finding optimized solution. The RMSE error by using the optimized set of parameters for the air temperatures of MT box is calculated to be less than 1 K after calibration for a cycle-sentry operation. Differential Evolution with surrogate assist is found to be the best option among the optimization algorithms.