Decentralized Optimal Merging Control With Optimization of Energy Consumption for Connected Hybrid Electric Vehicles

This paper presents a new approach for solving the optimal merging control problem for hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) under a connected environment. To achieve a reduction in energy consumption and save travel time, this paper focuses on deriving a decentralized feedback control law that provides not only the optimal velocity trajectory for merging but also a torque distribution strategy for the HEV powertrain. For this purpose, a distance domain-based optimal control problem is first proposed to avoid a free end-time cost function formulation that usually arises due to considering the minimization of traveling time. Then, the vehicle dynamics take into account the constraint of the optimization problem to evaluate the energy consumption at the power device level instead of the acceleration, unlike the common method used for reducing energy consumption in previous studies of merging control with linear models. The proposed optimization problem is solved by Pontryagin’s maximum principle, and a traffic-in-the-loop powertrain simulation platform with a real-world emulated traffic scenario and high-fidelity HEV powertrain model is constructed to eliminate the randomly generated merging scenario. Finally, the simulation results obtained on the platform are demonstrated to validate the effectiveness of the proposed decentralized merging control law.