Optimal eco-driving cycles for conventional vehicles using a genetic algorithm

Abstract

The goal of this work is to compute the eco-driving cycles for vehicles equipped with internal combustion engines by using a genetic algorithm (GA) with a focus on reducing energy consumption. The proposed GA-based optimization method uses an optimal control problem (OCP), which is framed considering both fuel consumption and driver comfort in the cost function formulation with the support of a tunable weight factor to enhance the overall performance of the algorithm. The results and functioning of the optimization algorithm are analyzed with several widely used standard driving cycles and a simulated real-world driving cycle. For the selected optimal weight factor, the simulation results show that an average reduction of eight percent in fuel consumption is achieved. The results of parallelization in computing the cost function indicates that the computational time required by the optimization algorithm is reduced based on the hardware used.