Optimizing the Fuel Consumption of Autonomous Vehicles using Convex-Concave Programming

The recent introduction of electronic, sensing, positioning and information technologies into road transportation systems has allowed safer cruising and faster navigation of vehicles. The next frontier is the transformation of road transport into a highly automated system through the deployment of connected and automated vehicles. One of the important challenges to achieve this, is the trajectory optimization of an autonomous vehicle while traversing a specific road segment in order to minimize some metric of interest. In this context, we formulate the problem of optimal acceleration profile selection to minimize the fuel consumption of an autonomous vehicle as a discrete-time optimal control problem. To estimate fuel consumption, we consider a non-convex empirical metamodel that computes the output as a function of the acceleration and speed profile of the vehicle. As the resulting problem is non-convex, we construct a difference-of-convex functions representation of the fuel consumption metamodel and develop an iterative convex-concave programming procedure to solve the problem. Simulation results for various scenarios demonstrate that the proposed approach is considerably faster and provides better solutions compared to a state-of-practice nonlinear solver.This work has also been supported by the Government of the Republic of Cyprus through the Directorate General for European Programmes, Coordination and Development and the Research Promotion Foundation (Project: CULTURE/BR-NE/0517/14). © 2019 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. Permission from IEEE must be obtained for all other uses, in any current or future media, including reprinting/republishing this material for advertising or promotional purposes, creating new collective works, for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or reuse of any copyrighted component of this work in other works. A. Hadjigeorgiou and S. Timotheou, "Optimizing the Fuel Consumption of Autonomous Vehicles using Convex-Concave Programming," 2020 European Control Conference (ECC), Saint Petersburg, Russia, 2020, pp. 414-419