Energy savings from an Eco-Cooperative Adaptive Cruise Control: a BEV platoon investigation

This paper implements an ecological cooperative adaptive cruise control (Eco-CACC) on the ego battery electric vehicle (BEV) of a two-vehicle platoon by using a Nonlinear Model Predictive Control (NMPC) framework. By considering various speed profiles of the reference vehicle, this approach balances an inter-vehicular distance reduction with a velocity profile smoothing in order to minimize powertrain energy consumption. Although a short inter-vehicular distance benefits from the slipstream effect, the power losses due to an aggressive tracking can nullify such a benefit. Considering a spontaneous platoon with this approach, in a realistic driving case scenario a BEV can reduce its energy consumption by up to 40% as compared to a conventional adaptive cruise control (ACC) strategy. Thus, a proof-of-concept for the NMPC implementation of an Eco-CACC approach is provided. Furthermore, the reductions in savings due to horizon shortening are assessed by Dynamic Programming (DP).