Model-free speed management for a heterogeneous platoon of connected ground vehicles

Abstract

Motivated by military applications, this work considers connected platoons of ground vehicles of potentially different sizes and presents a model-free approach for optimizing the speed of the platoon to adjust the tradeoff between fuel economy and mobility as measured by travel speed. The motivation to seek a model-free solution is twofold: (1) vehicle models that are typically assumed to be available in model-based methods are not available on-board for military vehicles; (2) a model-free solution can offer robustness to modeling errors. Therefore, in this paper, the problem of optimizing the tradeoff between fuel economy and mobility of a mixed platoon is formulated as an optimization problem and solved using the model-free Nelder-Mead approach. To explore the performance characteristics of this approach, a case study is performed with two different size vehicles that are representative of military trucks, both in simulation and in a novel networked engine-in-the-loop setup. The results show that the proposed approach can achieve the desired balance between fuel economy and mobility in a model-free manner despite the nonlinearity caused by gear shift deadzones, albeit at the expense of relatively slow convergence time. In addition, a design guideline for the parameters in the Nelder-Mead approach is also discussed.

Keywords:

• connected vehicles
• fuel economy
• model-free optimization
• platoon

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Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Automotive Research Center (ARC) in accordance with Cooperative Agreement W56HZV-14-2-0001 U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command (CCDC) Ground Vehicle System Center (GVSC) Warren, MI. DISTRIBUTION STATEMENT A. Approved for public release; distribution unlimited. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 1646019. Division of Computer and Network Systems.