Energy-Efficient Connected Cruise Control With Lean Penetration of Connected Vehicles

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-everything (V2X) 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 speed 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. Controller synthesis for gain parameters is conducted over downstream traffic data and evaluated over a combination of synthetic and real cycles. It is demonstrated that even with lean penetration of connected vehicles, our controller can bring significant energy savings.

Automated summary

This paper focuses on designing an energy-efficient longitudinal controller for a connected automated truck that operates in mixed traffic conditions. The controller utilizes vehicle-to-everything (V2X) communication to gather information about connected vehicles beyond line of sight. A novel connected cruise control design is proposed, which incorporates delays to account for the finite propagation speed of traffic waves caused by distant connected vehicles. The speeds of non-connected vehicles are modeled as stochastic processes. The paper presents a fundamental theorem linking the spectral properties of motion signals to average energy consumption, and evaluates the controller using a combination of synthetic and real traffic data, demonstrating significant energy savings even with a low penetration of connected vehicles.