Traffic light assistant system for optimized energy consumption in an electric vehicle

Paper in proceeding, 2014

Increasingly intelligent vehicle driving systems are rapidly being developed, and will in the future become a necessity for sustainable, convenient and safe mobility in our ever more urbanized world. This paper presents an innovative approach for the control of a fully electric vehicle approaching a road segment with Multiple Traffic Lights (TL). By utilizing Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure (V2I) communication, the energy consumption for the maneuver completion can be reduced. The problem is approached from a Model Predictive Control (MPC) framework. The performance of the system is evaluated using a complex simulation toolchain representing the vehicle, powertrain, driver, and road including the traffic conditions. The results have shown an overall energy consumption reduction of 29 % for an idealized case and 17 % for a real road simulated scenario as compared to ‘normal’ human driver behavior.