Abstract
Connected and Autonomous vehicles (CAVs) have the ability to use information obtained via Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I), Vehicle-to-Vehicle communication (V2V), and sensors to improve their fuel economy through predictive strategies, including velocity trajectory optimization and optimal traffic light arrival and departure. These powertrain control strategies operate on a slow timescale relative to the engine dynamics, hence assume that the engine torque production is instantaneous. This assumption results in a torque command profile that may lead to engine dynamics constraint violation, actuator saturation, poor tracking performance, decreased efficiency, poor drivability, and increased emissions. To address this issue, a supplemental controller based on an iterative hierarchical Model Predictive Control (MPC) is proposed in this paper. The constraint satisfaction is achieved through a novel two-way communication of the Lagrange multipliers. The proposed methodology is demonstrated on an autonomous Diesel semi-truck on two maneuvers. Compared to a traditional centralized approach, the proposed method achieves systematic constraints satisfaction with negligible effect on fuel economy, less than 1%, and significantly improved computation time, more than 10 times.