Designing a Real-Time Implementable Optimal Adaptive Cruise Control for Improving Battery Health and Energy Consumption in EVs through V2V Communication

Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) face challenges like their limited all-electric range, the discrepancy between promised and actual energy efficiency, and battery health degradation, despite their environmental benefits. This article proposes an optimal adaptive cruise control (OACC) framework by leveraging ideal vehicle-to-vehicle communication to address these challenges. In a connected vehicle environment, where it is assumed that the Ego vehicle’s vehicle control unit (VCU) accurately knows the speed and position of the Leading vehicle, the VCU can optimally plan the acceleration trajectory for a short-term future time window through a model predictive control (MPC) framework tailored to BEVs. The primary objective of the OACC is to reduce the energy consumption and battery state-of-health degradation of a BEV. The Chevrolet Spark 2015 is chosen as the BEV platform used to validate the effectiveness of the proposed OACC. Simulations conducted under urban and highway driving conditions, as well as under communication delay and infused noise, resulted in up to a 3.7% reduction in energy consumption and a 9.7% reduction in battery state-of-health (SOH) degradation, demonstrating the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed OACC.