Linear Quadratic Control for Heavy Duty Vehicle Platooning

Abstract:

Scania CV AB has estimated that the fuel consumption constitutes 30% of the operational costs of a heavy duty vehicle. With the increasing oil price, reducing the fuel consumption becomes highly profitable. A mitigation to the high fuel consumption is to form a platoon. By introducing vehicle platooning, the fuel consumption is reduced for the following vehicles. The fuel consumption is reduced due to the slipstream effect, which is an atmospheric drag reduction that occurs behind a traveling vehicle. Therefore, by driving the vehicles at a close intermediate distance, the overall resistive force is reduced. First a study of robustness, of a finite long platoon based upon the string stability criteria, is done. The main focus of this thesis is to find a centralized control law for a finite platoon, which considers the air drag reduction. A LQR and a LQT controller are presented with respect to a given information structure for a three-vehicle platoon. Simulation results show an energy reduction of up to 11.4% for the second vehicle and up to 13.1% for the third vehicle, when driving 80 km/h in a platoon on a highway between Södertälje and Norrköping with a time headway of 0.25 s.