Predictive Cruise Controller for Electric Vehicle to Save Energy and Extend Battery Lifetime

Electric vehicles are considered the most effective solution to the petroleum crisis and reduction of air pollution. In order to enhance energy efficiency and battery lifetime, this paper designs a predictive cruise controller (EC) for electric vehicles. Road information and traffic preview are employed for velocity planning while minimizing energy usage, maintaining battery health, and avoiding collision with a lead vehicle. To enable real-time implementation, we apply a model predictive control (MPC) framework formulated in space domain, and approximation and relaxation are introduced to obtain a smooth nonlinear program. Simulation results indicate that the proposed controller yields suboptimal performance as compared to the globally optimal solution. For higher practicability on real-life scenarios, we develop an enhanced EC that is capable of optimizing the stopping of the ego vehicle. According to the car-following studies where the lead vehicle is driven using real-life data, the enhanced EC achieves $7.14 \%$ energy saving and $29.81 \%$ battery life extension when compared to the intelligent driving model. The computation time of $40 \,\mathrm{ms}$ per MPC update also demonstrates its potential for real-time applications.