Distributed Eco-Driving Control of a Platoon of Electric Vehicles Through Riccati Recursion

This paper presents a distributed optimization procedure for the cooperative eco-driving control problem of a platoon of electric vehicles subject to safety and travel time constraints. Individual optimal trajectories are generated for each platoon member to account for heterogeneous vehicles and for the road slope. By rearranging the problem variables, the Riccati recursion can be applied along the chain-like structure of the platoon and be used to solve the problem by repeatedly transmitting information up and down the platoon. Since each vehicle is only responsible for its own part of the computations, the proposed control strategy is privacy-preserving and could therefore be deployed by any group of vehicles to form a platoon spontaneously while driving. The energy efficiency of this control strategy is evaluated in numerical experiments for platoons of electric trucks with different masses and rated motor powers.