Event-Triggered Control of an Electric-Vehicle Traction Drive Under Denial-of-Service Attacks

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are becoming the center of future transportation, which rely heavily on Brushless DC motors due to their high efficiency and reliability, their reliance on electronic control units and controller area network (CAN). However, EVs are vulnerable to cyberattacks such as Denial-of-Service (DoS) and False Data Injection. This research work presents an event-triggered control (ETC) method for an electric-vehicle traction drive (EVTD) subject to network-induced DoS interruptions. Using a BLDC motor model, we design a hybrid, attack-aware ETC scheme that guarantees finite-time input-to-state stability in nominal operation, preserves finite-time stability (FTS) under DoS intervals, and eliminates Zeno behavior through strictly positive inter-event times. A Lyapunov analysis provides explicit triggering conditions and DoS admissibility bounds. Simulation results demonstrate fast convergence of speed and position states with substantially fewer network transmissions than periodic sampling. Without DoS, the controller achieves finite-time regulation with only ~50 events over the horizon. under DoS, stability is retained with ~85 events, still far below a time-triggered baseline, while the hybrid trigger adapts transmission density around attack windows. The proposed scheme reduces bus utilization, limits performance degradation during DoS, and offers practical tuning rules that balance tracking quality and communication frugality for CAN-based EV traction systems.