The main focus of this thesis is the investigation of nonlinear control designs on the airpath of a diesel engine equipped with exhaust gas recirculation (EGR) and variable geometry turbocharger (VGT). This problem presents strong couplings between controlled variables and actuators, since both EGR and VGT flows are driven by gases in the exhaust manifold. An additional coupling arises from the common shaft of the compressor and the turbine. The multivariable, highly nonlinear dynamics of the system gives motivation for model-based nonlinear control. Firstly, an eighth order mean-value model of the diesel engine is derived. This is consequently used to perform closed-loop simulations and to tune the controller gains offline. To reduce the complexity of the controllers, a third-order mean-value is used to design the nonlinear controllers.