Energy efficiency management in vehicles using road profile and predictive control: A conceptual study

In this paper, a predictive control approach to increase the energy efficiency in a vehicle is presented. Even if the car's CO2 emissions have been decreased in the last years and fulfill the EU specifications, the overall green-house gas emissions is increasing. Thus, we present a proof-of-concept strategy which takes into account the road elevation in order to reduce the fuel consumption and implicit the CO2 emissions. Starting from the hypothesis that the road tomography is available an advanced control approach (MPC) is designed. In our simulation, the EPSAC (Extended Prediction Self-Adaptive Control) predictive controller was implemented using as prediction the road profile. The obtained results were compared against the classical PID controller. From the results it's clear that the predictions can substantially enhance the control performance. An MPC-like implementation seems to be the most suitable way to cope with the system constraints while benefiting from future information about the road variability.