Solving Eco-Driving Problems using Indirect Collocation Method and Smooth Representation

Abstract

This paper discusses the eco-driving problem, considering both electric and conventional powertrains, and presents a pathway to solving it numerically using an indirect collocation method. Despite the low-order system dynamics, the piecewise fuel/efficiency map, gear shifting, and real-world traffic/road situations bring system discontinuities/switchings and pure state constraints into the problem formulation, which make the problem highly nonlinear and nontrivial to solve. This paper introduces smooth approximations to convert the original problem to an unconstrained (and penalized) smooth boundary-value problem. This approach eliminates the discussion of the switching structure and leads to a lightweight Newton-method-based solution procedure.