Distributed Cooperative Control of Two Electric Vehicles in Hilly Terrain

The cooperative centralised control schemes for Hybrid Electric Vehicles (HEV) yield energy-optimal trajectories but suffer from a lack of scalability with growing platoon size due to complex global optimization problems. This paper presents an algorithm for a distributed scheme for energy-optimal control of two electric Heavy-Duty Vehicles driving in hilly terrain. The proposed distributed controller uses an Alternating Direction Method of Multiplier. The performance of the distributed controller is studied through simulation and compared with a centralised controller. It has been found that the proposed controller has distributed nature which scales well with the growing number of vehicles in the platoon, ensuring the overall energy-optimality of the platoon.