Fuel Economy-Oriented Vehicle Platoon Control Using Economic Model Predictive Control

Vehicle platoon control based on vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) communication is one of the promising technologies to improve the performance of transportation systems. This paper presents a distributed controller to optimize a vehicle platoon’s fuel consumption by combining the switching feedback control and economic model predictive control (EMPC) methods. The closed-loop dynamics involving switching feedback gains with the constant time headway (CTH) policy are established firstly, and the multiple-predecessor following (MPF) communication topology is considered. In order to obtain the economy optimal feedback gain, we design a local optimal control problem for each vehicle, based on which the average dwell time is defined and the distributed EMPC algorithm is designed. Based on linear matrix inequalities (LMIs) and the Lyapunov theorem, the feedback gain selection method and the lower bound for average dwell time that guarantees asymptotic stability are analyzed rigorously. Then a modified algorithm that can ensure string stability is designed. Numerical simulations show a maximum of 6.84% fuel benefit compared with pure tracking-oriented methods.