Research on Tracking Improvement for Electric Vehicle during a Car-following Process

In this paper, the electric vehicle (EV) with an adaptive cruise control (ACC) function is chosen as an object to study the car-following process. Multiple objectives contains safety, tracking, comfort and energy economy are optimized based on the model predictive control (MPC) theory. As distinguished from other studies: a strategy for the weight adjustment is proposed to improve the tracking, in which some weights in MPC can be adjusted according to the relative velocity of two vehicles in real time. The proposed control strategy are evaluated for two different traffic scenarios. The simulation results show that proposed control strategy has better tracking performance than the control strategy with the constant weight. While the tracking is improved, the energy economy is also improved in proposed strategy.