Cooperative Levels in Eco-Driving of Electric Vehicle Platoons

In a connected and automated world, based on the amount of information shared and the motivation for the common good, three levels of cooperation, namely non-cooperative, cooperative and centralized cooperatives schemes are defined. In this paper, a car following eco-driving scenario with the three levels of cooperation, is formulated as three different optimal control problems. The formulated optimal control problems are solved using Pontryagin's Minimum Principle and analytical solutions are presented. The three proposed controllers are evaluated for energy efficiency and string compactness with Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) as baseline. Results show that while non-cooperative eco-driving algorithm is energy efficient with a single follower, it performs worse in terms of energy efficiency and string compactness in a platoon, in comparison to ACC. However, the cooperative algorithm overcomes the drawbacks of the former. The centralized cooperative eco-driving algorithm, performs best in terms of platoon energy efficiency and string compactness with respect to the other two cooperative schemes and ACC, if the first vehicle performs eco-driving optimal control.