Cooperative energy management of automated vehicles

This paper presents a cooperative adaptive cruise controller that controls vehicles along a planned route in a possibly hilly terrain, while keeping safe distances among the vehicles. The controller consists of two predictive layers that may operate with different update frequencies, horizon lengths and model abstractions. The top layer plans kinetic energy in a centralized manner by solving a quadratic program, whereas the bottom layer optimizes gear in a decentralized manner by solving a dynamic program. The efficiency of the proposed controller is shown through several case studies with different horizon lengths and number of vehicles in the platoon.