Energy-optimal Adaptive Cruise Control for Electric Vehicles based on Nonlinear Model Predictive Control

This paper presents a novel function of energy optimal adaptive cruise control (EACC) for electric vehicles based on model predictive control (MPC), which optimally plans the host car's speed trajectory for higher energy efficiency through taking the surrounding traffic information and the road conditions ahead into account. To cope with the nonlinearity of the system dynamics, nonlinear MPC (NMPC) is designed in this paper. Afterwards, the nonlinear equality constraints are relaxed so that the optimization problem has a convex feasible set. Moreover, it is proven that the nonlinear problem can be recast as a second -order cone programming (SOCP) problem. The performance of NMPC is evaluated in the real driving condition and compared to both linear MPC and receding horizon dynamic programming (RH-DP). In order to enable real-time control, the interior point method is used to solve both linear and nonlinear MPC problems and the computation time is investigated in this paper.