Event-Driven Energy-Efficient Driving Control in Urban Traffic for Connected Electric Vehicles

The traffic light in urban areas dominates the traffic flow, resulting in variation of energy consumption of the vehicles involved. To mitigate the impact of traffic bias on the energy efficiency of electric vehicles (EVs), this article proposes an event-driven energy-efficient driving control (EEDC) strategy based on a receding horizon two-stage control framework, which harnesses the Internet of Vehicles to incorporate the traffic light and preceding vehicle for adaption of different driving scenarios. At the core of the first stage are the vehicle driving event classification rules, which classified the urban traffic scenarios into four events. This article contributes to empirical solutions on the design of the traffic scenario classifier considering conflict goals, including driving efficiency and safety. In the second stage, the speed trajectory in each driving event is optimized using Pontryagin’s minimum principle to reduce vehicle energy consumption. A real-time solution for the energy-efficient driving problem is derived with the consideration of vehicle dynamics, control input, and speed limit constraints. Finally, extensive simulations and road tests are conducted to evaluate the effectiveness of the EEDC. The results show that the EEDC is excellent in energy efficiency improvement over two benchmark strategies in different traffic scenarios while satisfying the constraints in inter-vehicle driving safety and travel time. Moreover, the road tests demonstrate that the EEDC is capable of energy saving in real-world driving.