Fuel-Efficient Truck Platooning using Speed Profile Optimization

Licentiate thesis, 2017

This thesis is concerned with fuel-efficient driving strategies for heavy-duty vehicles driving on highways with varying topography. A method for reducing the fuel consumption of single trucks and platoons consisting of several trucks is described and evaluated both in simulation and in real trucks. The method, referred to as speed profile optimization (SPO), uses a genetic algorithm to find fuel-efficient speed profiles. Using SPO, the fuel consumption of a single truck was reduced by 11.5% (on average) relative to standard cruise control. The method’s extension to platooning (P-SPO), reduced the fuel consumption by 15.8% to 17.4% for homogeneous and heterogeneous platoons (with different mass configurations), respectively, relative to the combination of cruise control and adaptive cruise control, when applied to road profiles of 10 km length. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that the results obtained in the simulations are sufficiently accurate to be transferred to real trucks. The SPO and P-SPO methods also outperform the commonly used MPC- based methods by a few percentage points: For single trucks, SPO outper- formed an MPC-based approach by 3 percentage points, in a case with iden- tical roads and similar experimental settings. Similarly, for a platoon of two trucks, P-SPO outperformed an MPC-based approach by around 3 percent- age points.