Control device and control method for vehicle drive unit

A control device for controlling, based on an operating state of a vehicle, a vehicle drive unit having one or more power sources, the control device comprising:

• a processor;
• and
• a storage device configured to store a vehicle front-rear acceleration prediction model being a machine learning model that receives as an input a command torque, which is a vehicle drive torque commanded to the vehicle drive unit, and outputs predicted acceleration, which is a predicted value of vehicle front-rear acceleration, wherein
• the processor is configured to:
• execute a predicted acceleration calculation process to calculate the predicted acceleration using the vehicle front-rear acceleration prediction model;
• and
• execute a command torque calculation process to calculate the command torque that minimizes an evaluation function, the evaluation function minimizing a deviation of the predicted acceleration with respect to a target vehicle front-rear acceleration according to a target torque being a target value of the vehicle drive torque based on the operating state while reducing a deviation of the command torque with respect to the target torque.