Energy-Efficient Predictive and Reactive Control of Connected Electric Vehicles Platoon With String Stability Based on Variable Time Headway
Wei Li, Ziyu Song, Haitao Ding, Nan Xu
Abstract
Platooning is a remarkable research direction in connected electric vehicles for improving energy efficiency. This study proposes an energy-efficient predictive and reactive control strategy of connected electric vehicles platoon with string stability based on variable time headway (VTH). First, a trajectory prediction method is designed to predict future motion of the adjacent preceding vehicle of a platoon, according to the information of downstream vehicles. Combining the predictive trajectory of the adjacent preceding vehicle with model predictive control (MPC), the platoon leader executes energy-saving velocity optimization to achieve macro-level energy efficiency for the entire platoon. Second, a reactive controller is proposed to further improve energy-saving potential and guarantee stability. It is committed to achieving dual energy-saving effects and guaranteeing the string stability of the platoon, by designing an enhanced VTH policy and a distributed cascaded proportional-integral–derivative (DCPID) control algorithm. Subsequently, a real dataset is used to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy. The results indicate the excellent performance of our proposed control strategy in three traffic states. Finally, the real-time requirement of the control strategy is verified by hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) testing.