Development of techniques for the minimization of fuel consumption in road vehicles via optimal scheduling of velocity and gear shifting with known road data

Abstract

This thesis, deals with the problem of reducing fuel consumption of conventional road vehicles, with major emphasis on medium and heavy duty commercial trucks equipped with conventional powertrains. The main idea is the exploitation of technologies already available to guarantee large di usion of the proposed techniques and high impact on a short time horizon. The knowledge of the characteristics of the road to drive stretches the paradigm of energy saving from the power generation within the vehicle alone, towards the exploitation of this additional information for fuel consumption minimization. The goal is to exploit this information, in particular road grade or elevation for modulating vehicle speed and optimizing gear shifts. The key is to deliver mechanical power available in a fashion that maximises the nal objective of transportation: elapsed distance. Nowadays, one of the approaches used to pursue this objective is to perform an instantaneous optimization, based on either some optimality or heuristic principle. On the other hand, the vast majority of the approaches presented in literature, formulate and solve an optimal control problem. Its solution can be approached using optimal control methods or dynamic programming, although at the price of dealing with a potentially prohibitive computational load if suitable model assumptions and simpli cations are not made. ... [edited by Author]