Cyber-Physical Control for Energy-Saving Vehicle Following With Connectivity

This article aims to develop an optimal look-ahead control framework to maximize car-following fuel economy, while fulfilling requirements of intervehicle safety. Three original contributions make this work distinctive from the existing relevant literature. First, a model predictive fuel-optimal controller is constructed to optimize the vehicle speed and continuously variable transmission (CVT) gear ratio. The controller leverages state trajectories of the leading vehicle transmitted via Vehicle-to-Vehicle/Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2V/V2I) communication. How operating conditions affect the engine efficiency and CVT efficiency is explicitly taken into account. Second, the controller is sufficiently evaluated in a variety of traffic flows, such as cruising, urban, and highway-like driving, and is compared with a short-sighted alternative without V2V/V2I connectivity. Finally, we further demonstrate the advantages of the proposed scheme by a comparison with two existing benchmark controllers.