MPC based vehicular following control considering both fuel economy and tracking capability

To comprehensively deal with tracking capability and fuel economy issue of ACC-activated vehicle, this paper presents a MPC based vehicular following control algorithm. After compensating the nonlinearity of vehicle longitudinal dynamics by inverse model, the car-following system is built as 3-state space linear model. On its basis, a standard MPC optimization cost is constructed mainly considering the contradiction between fuel economy and tracking capability while other issues such as longitudinal ride comfort and driver acceptable tracking error are formulated as its I/O constraints. In order to avoid the computing infeasibility in receding horizon control, a slack variable is introduced to soften the I/O constraints, called ldquoSoftening Constraintrdquo. The success of MPC based vehicular following control algorithm is demonstrated under several traffic scenarios, showing its application improves both fuel economy and tracking capability while explicitly satisfying driver comfort requirement.