Energy saving performance improvement of intelligent connected PHEVs via NN-based lane change decision

Abstract

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) unite the advantages of the engine and electric motor which could provide great potential in saving energy. However, the fuel economy performance of the PHEVs is highly associated with the driving condition, especially for parallel PHEVs because they could not decouple the engine work status from the driving condition. Meanwhile, fuel economy performance is not only a longitudinal issue but also related to lane selection. Lane selection is an important driving behavior and the algorithm of lane selection is necessary for the development progress of intelligent connected vehicles. Energy consumption cost is an important part of the vehicle’s using consumption cost. Therefore, lane selection strategies must consider this point. With the development of intelligent connected vehicle technology, such as V2X (Vehicle to Everything), the potential of energy consumption performance of intelligent connected PHEVs could be improved by taking environment information from V2X and smart sensors into lane selection. In this paper, a neural network (NN) based method is proposed to predict the future status of the local vehicle using the information from V2X, and then another network is used to estimate the future energy consumption of each lane. The lane selection is decided on energy consumption estimation. Lastly, the effectiveness of the method is validated by simulation using Matlab combined with SUMO (Simulation of Urban MObility).