Networked Predictive Cruise Control for Road Vehicles

The increasing number of road vehicles is leading to more and more accidents making the driving safety a major research issue. Also, there are other issues that need to be addressed in order to ensure the passengers comfort, to reduce the mechanical components wear and the fuel consumption and to lower emissions. As such, the goal of this paper is to design a cruise controller based on a model predictive control strategy, that uses the concept of flexible control Lyapunov functions to guarantee the input-to-state stability of the system in a non-conservative way. Moreover, the proposed strategy takes into account the time-varying delays introduced by the communication network that links the controller with the remote process (driveline) by modeling them as disturbances. The cruise controller was tested using TrueTime Toolbox for Matlab/Simulink to show that it can handle both the performance/physical constraints and the strict limitations on the computational complexity.