Energy-efficient Connected Cruise Control with Lean Penetration of Connected Vehicles

TL;DR

This paper presents a novel energy-efficient cruise control method for connected trucks in mixed traffic, leveraging V2V communication and delay-aware control to reduce energy consumption.

Contribution

It introduces a new control design that accounts for delays in V2V communication and models non-connected vehicle speeds as stochastic, improving energy efficiency in mixed traffic.

Findings

Significant energy savings with lean penetration of connected vehicles.

Delay-aware control improves energy efficiency in mixed traffic.

Theoretical link between traffic wave properties and energy consumption.

Abstract

This paper focuses on energy-efficient longitudinal controller design for a connected automated truck that travels in mixed traffic consisting of connected and non-connected vehicles. The truck has access to information about connected vehicles beyond line of sight using vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication. A novel connected cruise control design is proposed which incorporates additional delays into the control law when responding to distant connected vehicles to account for the finite propagation of traffic waves. The speeds of non-connected vehicles are modeled as stochastic processes. A fundamental theorem is proven which links the spectral properties of the motion signals to the average energy consumption. This enables us to tune controller parameters and maximize energy efficiency. Simulations with synthetic data and real traffic data are used to demonstrate the energy efficiency of the control design. It is demonstrated that even with lean penetration of connected vehicles, our controller can bring significant energy savings.