Connect & Drive: design and evaluation of cooperative adaptive cruise control for congestion reduction

Road throughput can be increased by driving at small inter-vehicle time gaps. The amplification of velocity disturbances in upstream direction, however, poses limitations to the minimum feasible time gap. This effect is covered by the notion of string stability. String-stable behavior is thus considered an essential requirement for the design of automatic distance control systems, which are needed to allow for safe driving at time gaps well below 1 s. Using wireless inter-vehicle communications to provide real-time information of the preceding vehicle, in addition to the information obtained by common Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) sensors, appears to significantly decrease the feasible time gap, which is shown by practical experiments with a test fleet consisting of six passenger vehicles. The large-scale deployment of this system, known as Cooperative ACC (CACC), however, poses challenges with respect to the reliability of the wireless communication system. A solution for this scalability problem can be found in decreasing the transmission power and/or beaconing rate, or adapting the communications protocol. Although the main CACC objective is to increase road throughput, the first commercial application of CACC is foreseen to be in truck platooning, since short distance following is expected to yield significant fuel savings in this case.

     

Hybrid optimal control of dry clutch engagement

Lately, with the increasing use of automated manual transmissions (AMT) the engagement control of the dry clutch becomes more important. The engagement control plays a crucial role, since different and conflicting objectives have to be satisfied: preservation of driver comfort, fast engagement and small friction losses. In this paper two optimal control strategies for clutch engagement, based on hybrid control principles, are compared. For developing a useful clutch control scheme, the driveline is modelled as a piecewise linear system. The first control strategy is widely known as explicit MPC. However, it seems that it is not suitable (yet) for this type of problem. The second strategy is a piecewise LQ controller, based on piecewise quadratic Lyapunov functions. Simulation results obtained with both strategies are presented and discussed.