Optimization for energy efficient cooperative adaptive cruise control
In the recent years, substantial amount of researches have been centred around automated driving both in academia and in the automotive industries. One of the main target of those researches is to reduce energy consumption and consequently mitigate the effect of fuel emissions. Tremendous fuel saving can be achieved by taking advantage of the topographic information and by employing techniques to reduce air drag. This thesis presents a method for minimizing fuel consumption of truck platoons travelling on hilly roads with respect to both the topography and air drag. The problem is formulated as a convex quadratic programming problem that, in a moving horizon approach, optimizes vehicles' velocities, while not violating the minimum inter vehicular distance constraint. Emphasis is put on a homogeneous three vehicle platoon and real time solvers are generated using FORCES Pro to solve the problem centrally and in a decoupled approach. The proposed control scheme is computationally efficient, while the results show fuel saving of up to 5.6% for a three vehicle platoon travelling on the Boras Landvetter Boras drive cycle depending on the vehicles' weights.