Safe and Energy-Saving Vehicle-Following Driving Decision-Making Framework of Autonomous Vehicles

The safety and energy efficiency of autonomous vehicles in the vehicle-following driving scenario is seriously affected by the decision-making framework. This article proposes a safe and energy-saving decision-making framework for autonomous vehicles to avoid the potential rear-end collision and improve the energy efficiency in vehicle-following driving scenario. To realize this framework, the vehicle longitudinal dynamics model is first presented, and the autonomous vehicle's requirements from the safety and energy efficiency perspectives are comprehensively analyzed in the vehicle-following driving scenario. Then, a two-stage decision-making framework is designed. The first stage determines the safety region in the powertrain control domain, and the second stage determines the optimal energy efficiency in the safety region. Based on the two-stage decision-making framework, the perspective of “safety first” principle can be enforced by simultaneously considering the driving safety and energy efficiency. Finally, the experiment is conducted to demonstrate the advantages of the proposed method by comparing it with two other state-of-art methods.