Energy and Flow Effects of Optimal Automated Driving in Mixed Traffic: Vehicle-in-the-Loop Experimental Results

TL;DR

This study demonstrates that an anticipative car-following algorithm in a Vehicle-in-the-Loop environment can significantly reduce energy consumption of connected and automated vehicles in mixed traffic, maintaining safety and flow.

Contribution

It introduces a VIL testing setup and an anticipative control algorithm that improves energy efficiency in CAVs without compromising safety or traffic flow.

Findings

Up to 30% energy savings compared to human drivers.

Effective real-time interaction between experimental CAVs and virtual traffic.

Validated energy reduction across city and highway drive cycles.

Abstract

This paper experimentally demonstrates the effectiveness of an anticipative car-following algorithm in reducing energy use of gasoline engine and electric Connected and Automated Vehicles (CAV), without sacrificing safety and traffic flow. We propose a Vehicle-in-the-Loop (VIL) testing environment in which experimental CAVs driven on a track interact with surrounding virtual traffic in real-time. We explore the energy savings when following city and highway drive cycles, as well as in emergent highway traffic created from microsimulations. Model predictive control handles high level velocity planning and benefits from communicated intentions of a preceding CAV or estimated probable motion of a preceding human driven vehicle. A combination of classical feedback control and data-driven nonlinear feedforward control of pedals achieve acceleration tracking at the low level. The controllers are implemented in ROS and energy is measured via calibrated OBD-II readings. We report up to 30% improved energy economy compared to realistically calibrated human driver car-following without sacrificing following headway.