Intelligent energy management system for conventional autonomous vehicles

Autonomous vehicles have been envisioned to increase vehicle safety, primarily via the reduction of accidents. However, their design could also affect the vehicle travel demand and energy consumption. Although battery-powered electric and hybrid-electric autonomous vehicles assume more widespread use than conventional autonomous vehicles, energy management is harder and more significant for conventional autonomous vehicles. As such, it is necessary to investigate how to manage energy consumption in conventional autonomous vehicles. In this paper, an energy management system is constructed and analyzed by using a road-power-demand model and an intelligent system to reduce fuel consumption for a conventional autonomous vehicle. The road-power-demand model utilizes three impact factors (i) environment-conditions (ii) driver-behavior, and (iii) vehicle-specifications. The proposed intelligent energy management system includes a fuzzy-logic-system with the aim of generating the desired engine torque, based on the vehicle road power demand and a PID controller to control the air/fuel ratio, by changing the throttle angle. Results show that the intelligent energy management system reduces the vehicle energy consumption from 7.2 to 6.71 L/100 km. Next, the parameters of the fuzzy-logic-system are intelligently optimized by the particle-swarm-optimization method and new results indicate that the vehicle energy consumption is reduced by around 9.58%. •Using maximum engine torque can reduce fuel consumption of Autonomous Vehicle (AV).•Integration of fuzzy and PID controller will improve energy efficiency of AV.•Optimizing the fuzzy membership function can reduce energy consumption of AVs.•A model of controller, environment and vehicle is useful for AV energy efficiency.