Defensive Ecological Adaptive Cruise Control Considering Neighboring Vehicles' Blind-Spot Zones

This paper proposes a defensive ecological adaptive cruise control (DEco-ACC) algorithm that is capable of reducing an ego vehicle's dwelling time in the blind spot zones (BSZs) of its neighboring vehicles. To this end, a model predictive control is applied in the use of information such as speed, position, and blind spot zones about preceding and neighboring vehicles. The cost function of the DEco-ACC consists of tracking performance, control effort, and dwelling time in BSZs. Specifically, a continuous and one-time differentiable penalty function is introduced to handle the constraints regarding the BSZs. For optimizing and evaluating the performance of the proposed DEco-ACC, real-world traffic data from Next Generation Simulation (NGSIM) are used to analyze and generate car-following scenarios during highway driving. Especially, in consideration of the most probable case that one neighboring vehicle exists at one adjacent lane, a parametric study is conducted to investigate the impact of the weighting factors on the performance of the DEco-ACC. The simulation results from 100 cases demonstrate that on average, the DEco-ACC with optimized weighting factors can reduce the dwelling time in the neighboring vehicles' BSZs by 46.3% without significant deterioration of fuel consumption (0.04% increase in average fuel consumption) and drivability, as compared to the Eco-ACC, whose primary objective is the minimization of fuel consumption during safe car-following.