Ecological cooperative adaptive cruise control of over‐actuated electric vehicles with in‐wheel motor in traffic flow

Since electric vehicle with in-wheel motor has advantages in aspects of vehicle dynamics control and energy-efficient control, it has been widely applied in the vehicle platoon in the highway. This paper proposes an optimization and control structure that integrates ecological cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) for the vehicle platoon, and path tracking and ecological control allocation (Eco-CA) for individual vehicle to improve the energy efficiency of electric vehicles in traffic flow. First, in the upper layer, the suitable driving mode is selected by finite-state machine (FSM) based on surrounding environment. Then the path-planner and ecological CACC in the higher layer are proposed to determine the desired path and desired speed and acceleration profile. After that, in the middle layer, longitudinal motion controller and yaw stability controller are integrated to achieve the desired control targets from upper layer. Finally, in the lower layer, each in-wheel motor torque is optimized by Eco-CA subsystem to reduce the energy consumption of driving motor and tyre friction loss. The simulation results demonstrate that the proposed control strategy can improve the energy efficiency and dynamics control performance.