Ecological Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control for a Heterogeneous Platoon of Heavy-Duty Vehicles With Time Delays

To deal with energy crisis and environmental issues, higher fuel economy standards and more stringent limitations on greenhouse gas emissions for ground vehicles have been made. Ecological cooperative adaptive cruise control (Eco-CACC) has been considered as an effective solution to decrease the fuel consumption and greenhouse gas emissions of a platoon of vehicles, and this article proposes an Eco-CACC strategy for a heterogeneous platoon of heavy-duty vehicles with time delays. The proposed Eco-CACC strategy consists of distributed control protocols for the following vehicles and a new model predictive controller for the leading one. Firstly, after the distributed control protocols are designed based on the neighboring vehicle information, the sufficient conditions that guarantee the internal stability and string stability are derived, and the upper bound of the time delays under controller parameters is also obtained. Secondly, assuming the vehicle platoon as a rigid body with followers staying at desired positions, the new model predictive controller is designed in order to further improve the overall fuel economy of vehicle platoon. Simulations are conducted to validate the sufficient conditions of internal stability and string stability, and to explore the fuel saving performance of the proposed control strategy. The simulation results demonstrate that, compared with the benchmark, the proposed Eco-CACC strategy can significantly improve the fuel economy of heterogeneous platoon.