Potential analysis of predictive optimal velocity control for electric and conventional vehicles

Optimizing the velocity of a vehicle over a known future route can reduce fuel consumption. This article studies the potential fuel-savings of such systems for conventional vehicles, employing an internal combustion engine, and its application to electric vehicles. A main drawback of many optimization algorithms is their computational complexity, which prevents them from being used in real-time applications. To overcome this drawback a fast algorithm is presented to optimize the velocity of a vehicle with known route slope. Using this algorithm the consumption for five real world scenarios is simulated and compared against a constant velocity policy. The results achieved for the conventional vehicle are comparable to real-world results reported in other articles and offer about 20% fuel saving using free-wheeling compared to driving with a constant velocity. For electric vehicles the consumption savings, which can be achieved using free-wheeling lie around 3.5%.