Lane-changing Control for Hybrid Electric Vehicles with Dedicated Hybrid Transmission Based on Robust Model Predictive Control

Car-following and lane-changing are extremely important for vehicles. The traditional adaptive cruise control (ACC) strategy has various drawbacks due to the complicated driving conditions. A new control strategy of robust model predictive control (RMPC) for car-following and lane-changing is proposed based on a new type of hybrid electric vehicle (HEV) with dedicated hybrid transmission (DHT-HEV). The control model includes a vehicle model, a following and lane-changing model and an RMPC controller. The vehicle model integrates the DHT-HEV and dynamic models with a longitudinal dynamic model, seven degrees of freedom (DOF) vehicle dynamic model and three DOF control model. The following and lane-changing model is described as car-following and lane-changing models of two-quintic function. The RMPC controller is used to balance the control of vehicle longitudinal and lateral dynamics with the lateral acceleration disturbance. Simulation results demonstrate that the RMPC controller can track the reference trajectory during two lane-changing process when the test scenarios of different accelerations are set compared with the conventional ACC control. Different N-p (predictive horizon) and N-c (control horizon) are also analysed to improve the solving performance of RMPC. Results indicate that the solving performance of the system is optimal when N-p = 30 and N-c = 1. Furthermore, different weight coefficient matrixes ( Q and R ) are taken into the consideration by coordinating the car-following performance and lateral stability. Accordingly, the controllers of RMPC-LC, RMPC-ACC and RMPC-LA are set, demonstrating that the control of RMPC-LA best balances two aspects and is always within a safe car-following distance. Meanwhile, the hardware in the loop (HIL) is utilised to verify the effectiveness of the proposed RMPC control strategy, which comprises model compilation, the establishment connection between the D2P ECU and the simulator and control input.