Towards a Sustainable Highway Road-Based Driving Protocol for Connected and Self-Driving Vehicles

Fuel consumption and gas emissions of traveling vehicles have become of great consideration for green environmental researchers. Several technologies have been developed to enhance the efficiency of daily traveling vehicles in terms of fuel consumption. Moreover, many protocols have been developed to reduce the fuel consumption and emissions of traveling vehicles. However, most of these protocols were dedicated to downtown and urban areas, since they are considered more consuming scenarios. Drivers spend a long time traveling over highways toward a targeted destination. Small mistakes could lead to greater fuel consumption; the percentage of extra fuel consumption can be drastically increased when drivers repeatedly make the same efficiency mistakes during their trips. In this work, we aim to introduce a green protocol to assist drivers and self-driving vehicles to drive efficiently over highways in order to reduce the fuel economy and gas emission of their vehicles. This protocol is designed to keep the speed of the traveling gasoline vehicles steady as much as possible in order to save energy and enhance efficiency. It also smooths the acceleration and deceleration reactions of vehicles when required. The performance of the proposed protocol has been evaluated using an extensive set of experiments.