Intelligent Hybrid Electric Vehicle ACC With Coordinated Control of Tracking Ability, Fuel Economy, and Ride Comfort

Adaptive cruise control (ACC) of hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) has been traditionally developed without an efficient integration with active safety and energy management systems of hybrid powertrains, mainly for facilitating its implementation. This, however, leads to a compromise in the fuel economy of HEVs, since the predictive driving information provided by ACC is not exploited by the energy management system. In order to enhance the energy efficiency and control system integration, a novel ACC system for intelligent HEVs (i-HEV ACC) is developed in this study. The controller is proposed within the framework of nonlinear model predictive control, and a position-based nonlinear longitudinal intervehicle dynamics model is developed. A coordinated optimal control problem for both the tracking safety and the fuel consumption is formulated subject to the constraints on stable tracking. A multistep offline dynamic programming optimization and an online lookup table are used to implement the real-time control algorithm. Experiments are further conducted, which demonstrate that the proposed i-HEV ACC achieves enhanced performance and cooperation in traffic safety, fuel efficiency, and ride comfort.