Eco-driving Trajectory Planning of a Heterogeneous Platoon in Urban Environments

Given the increasing popularity and demand for connected and autonomous vehicles (CAVs), Eco-driving and platooning in highways and urban areas to increase the efficiency of the traffic system is becoming a possibility. This paper presents an Eco-driving trajectory planning approach for a platoon of heterogeneous electric vehicles (EVs) in urban environments. The proposed control strategy for the platoon considers energy consumption, mobility and passenger comfort, with which vehicles may pass signalized intersections with no stops. For a given urban route, first, the platoon's leader vehicle employs dynamic programming (DP) to plan a trajectory for the anticipated path with the aim of balancing energy consumption, mobility and passenger comfort. Then, other following CAVs in the platoon either follow the preceding vehicles, using a PID-based cooperative adaptive cruise control, or plan their own trajectory by checking whether they can pass the next intersection without stopping. Furthermore, a heavy vehicle that cannot efficiently follow a light-weight vehicle would instead employ the DP-based trajectory planner. The results of simulation studies demonstrate the efficacy of the proposed control strategy with which the platoon's energy consumption is shown to reduce while the mobility is not compromised. Copyright (c) 2022 The Authors. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license