A shrinking horizon approach to eco-driving for electric city buses:implementation and experimental results

Eco-driving aims at minimizing the energy consumption of a vehicle by changing the vehicle's velocity. This can be formulated as an optimal control problem and this paper presents an efficient shrinking horizon implementation to solve this problem. The efficient implementation is demonstrated on a case study of a fully electric bus, driving on an inner-city public transport route. Because the bus drives on designated bus lanes, meaning that it has little interaction with other traffic, and because it has frequent and predictable stops, this case will have a good energy consumption savings potential. An energy consumption reduction of 11.43% is achieved on a simulation study for the case that the vehicle is fully autonomous and a reduction of 6.94% is achieved experimentally for the case that the driver is 'coached' using a driver assistance system