Automatic Weight Determination in Model Predictive Control for Personalized Car-Following Control

Car-following control is a fundamental application of autonomous driving. This control has multiple objectives, including tracking a safe distance to a preceding vehicle and enhancing driving comfort. Model Predictive Control (MPC) is a powerful method due to its intuitiveness and capability to cover multiple objectives. MPC determines the relative importance of objectives through a set of weight factors, depending on which, the controller’s behavior changes even if the traffic situations are the same. However, determining the optimal weight is not a trivial problem because there is no benchmark to evaluate the performance of the weight, and searching for weight factors with repeated driving experiments is time-consuming. To solve this problem, we proposed an automatic tuning method to determine the weights of the MPC based on personal driving data. Personal driving data under naturalistic driving conditions provide car-following situations and driver’s behaviors. These data can generate a reference model to represent the driver’s driving style. Based on this model, the proposed method defined the automatic tuning problem as an optimization problem that minimizes the difference between the reference and the controller’s response using the optimal weight factors. This optimization problem was solved using the Particle Swarm Optimization algorithm. The proposed method was implemented with an embedded optimization coder in an offline fashion. Its performance was evaluated using personal driving data. From this, the proposed method can reduce the effort and time required for an engineer to find the optimal weight factors.