Saving Fuel for Heavy-Duty Vehicles Using Connectivity and Automation

Fuel economy optimization;Connectivity and Automation;Heavy-duty vehicles;Mechanical Engineering;Engineering;Mechanical Engineering

He, ChaozhePeng, Huei ;

University of Michigan

关键词: Fuel economy optimization;    Connectivity and Automation;    Heavy-duty vehicles;    Mechanical Engineering;    Engineering;    Mechanical Engineering;   

Others  :  https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/147523/hchaozhe_1.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y

瑞士|英语

来源: The Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship

【 摘 要 】

The booming of e-commerce is placing an increasing burden on freight transport system by demanding faster and larger amount of delivery.Despite the variety in freight transport means, the dominant freight transport method is still ground transport, or specifically, transport by heavy-duty vehicles.Roughly one-third of the annual ground freight transport expense goes to fuel expenses.If fuel costs could be reduced, the finance of freight transport would be improved and may increase the transport volume without additional charge to average consumers.A further benefit of reducing fuel consumption would be the related environmental impact.The fuel consumption of the heavy-duty vehicles, despite being the minority of road vehicles, has a major influence on the whole transportation sector, which is a major contributor to greenhouse gas emissions.Thus, saving fuel for heavy-duty trucks would also reduce greenhouse gas emission, leading to environmental benefits.For decades, researchers and engineers have been seeking to improve the fuel economy of heavy-duty vehicles by focusing on vehicles themselves, working on advancing the vehicle design in many aspects.More recently, attention has turned to improve fuel efficiency while driving in the dynamic traffic environment.Fuel savings effort may be realized due to advancements in connected and automated vehicle technologies, which provide more information for vehicle design and control.This dissertation presents state-of-the-art techniques that utilize connectivity and automation to improve the fuel economy of heavy-duty vehicles, while allowing them to stay safe in real-world traffic environments.These techniques focus on three different levels of vehicle control, and can result in significant fuel improvements at each level.Starting at the powertrain level, a gear shift schedule design approach is proposed based on hybrid system theory.The resulting design improves fuel economy without comprising driveability.This new approach also unifies the gear shift logic design of human-driven and automated vehicles, and shows a large potential in fuel saving when enhanced with higher level connectivity and automation.With this potential in mind, at the vehicle level, a fuel-efficient predictive cruise control algorithm is presented.This mechanism takes into account road elevation, wind, and aggregated traffic information acquired via connectivity.Moreover, a systematic tool to tune the optimization parameters to prioritize different objectives is developed.While the algorithm and the tool are shown to be beneficial for heavy-duty vehicles when they are in mild traffic, such benefits may not be attainable when the traffic is dense.Thus, at the traffic level, when a heavy-duty vehicle needs to interact with surrounding vehicles in dense traffic, a connected cruise control algorithm is proposed.This algorithm utilizes beyond-line-of-sight information, acquired through vehicle-to-vehicle communication, to gain a better understanding of the surrounding traffic so that the vehicle can response to traffic in a fuel efficient way.These techniques can bring substantial fuel economy improvements when applied individually.In practice, it is important to integrate these three techniques at different levels in a safe manner, so as to acquire the overall benefits. To achieve this, a safety verification method is developed for the connected cruise control, to coordinate the algorithms at the vehicle level and the traffic level, maximizing the fuel benefits while staying safe.