Fast Model Predictive Control-Based Fuel Efficient Control Strategy for a Group of Connected Vehicles in Urban Road Conditions

In this paper, we develop a fast model predictive control (MPC)-based fuel economic control strategy for a group of connected vehicles in urban road conditions. The proposed control strategy is decentralized in nature, as every vehicle evaluates its own strategy using only neighborhood information. Along with the vehicle-to-vehicle communication, we exploit the signal phase and timing information from traffic lights to develop computationally efficient MPC-based strategies that reduce stopping at red lights and improve the fuel economy for a group of vehicles. The simulation results indicate the improvement in group performance and computational advantages of our proposed method.