Optimal Strategies for Adaptive Cruise Control

In addition to providing good tracking capability and reducing fuel consumption, an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system is required to be very comfortable. Although several appealing ACC policies have been introduced so far, a few of which are currently in use, it is still difficult in general to find an ACC policy that is able to optimally combine requirements such as high safety, low fuel consumption and satisfactory comfort level. Additionally, no systematic methods are available for the optimization of a control policy performance. This chapter addresses these problems by comparing different ACC policies and developing an optimization method based on a multi-objective Pareto criterion, finalized at designing policies with an all-around performance. Furthermore, the designed optimal policy is tested in view of its application on real vehicles via simulations.