An Investigation on Vehicle Fuel Consumption Optimization Strategy Based on Scenario Information

The rapid development of vehicle-to-everything (V2X) and intelligent control technologies brings new opportunities and challenges to the traditional automotive control architecture. More driving information about traffic scenarios and ambient events such as the road slope, the traffic light timing is possible to be obtained via V2X system. And then, those traffic information will be extracted by individual vehicle’s controller and be further utilized to design the optimal control strategy. Fuel economy performance and time losses for waiting for the traffic red light are the two main concerns by most drivers. In order to obtain a satisfactory fuel economy performance and lower traveling time loss, this paper investigates an eco-driving problem for road vehicles when assuming the information of the traffic light ahead is prior known. The optimization problem by balancing the fuel consumption and time loss is designed and meanwhile the time phase of the traffic light is also considered. The optimization problem is firstly solved with the dynamic programming (DP) algorithm. Preliminary simulations have been implemented and the simulation results demonstrate the potential ability in improvement of the fuel economy performance. Moreover, an equivalent problem is formulated under the switching control system framework, to guarantee the hard constraint of the red light. The equivalent problem provides an interesting topic for the open discussion.