Analytical Eco-Driving for electric and conventional vehicles: A unified computational approach

This paper presents a methodology to generate energy efficient speed profiles for electric and conventional vehicles using analytical Eco-Driving solutions. In recent years, the energy savings that can be achieved by adjusting the speed of road vehicles have motivated the development of ecological driving strategies. From this perspective, different Eco-Driving strategies are formulated as free final time Optimal Control Problems aiming at minimizing the energy consumed during a trip subject to input and speed constraints. These Eco-Driving problems are solved using Pontryagin’s Minimum Principle to derive the closed-form expressions composing the (un-)constrained solutions. Moreover, the performance of the proposed strategies is compared against two reference cycles and the global optimal savings given by a Dynamic Programming strategy. The simulation results show that up to 26.43% and 32.18% of energy savings can be obtained for electrified and conventional vehicles, respectively, while keeping the computation time in a millisecond range. • Systematic methodology to generate Eco-Driving cycles analytically. • Near-optimal energy savings are obtained with the proposed solution method. • Adaptable trade-off between energy savings and trip time. • Substantial reduction of the computation time to generate Eco-Driving profiles.