Utopia-tracking multi-performance predictive cruise control for a group of connected vehicles on urban roads

In this paper, a multi-performance predictive cruise controller for vehicles in connected vehicle system is proposed based on the utopia point method. With the ad hoc wireless communication technology, the signal phase and timing (SPAT) information from traffic lights is firstly employed to determine some admissible velocity range. Then the optimal target velocity of vehicles is computed by minimizing the fuel economic polynomial models of the vehicle system. In order to systematically cope with the performances of fuel economy, car-following, ride comfort and safety, the multi-objective finite horizon optimal control problem is formulated to compute the multi-performance predictive cruise controllers. The multiple performances in this paper is handled with utopia point method, where the resulted cost function is the distance of the criteria vector of vehicles to its utopia-point (i.e. the vector of separately minimized criteria). Finally, simulations are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method in terms of improvement of multiple performances.