Development of a eHorizon strategy for HEVs with dynamic road situations model

The ADAS functions (Advanced Driver Assistance Systems) help the driver in the drive task, increasing driving pleasure and safety. ADAS functions are based on vehicle sensors, such as cameras, radar and lidar. With the advent of hybrid electric vehicles and purely electric vehicles, the level of vehicle on board electrification has increased significantly. This leads to the idea that a new kind of information can be processed: the V2X information (which means “vehicle to everything”). The ADAS functions that use V2X information and that can temporarily take the car's controls (such as accelerator pedal and brake pedal) are called, in this dissertation, eHorizon functions (electronic horizon functions). The main objective of the thesis is in fact to develop an eHorizon function for a hybrid electric vehicle based mainly on V2C information. The eHorizon function that has been developed during this thesis activity takes into account the status of the next traffic light (green, yellow or red) to optimize the usage of stored energy, to reduce polluting emissions and to increase driving pleasure. It overrides the accelerator pedal and / or brake pedal requests ("converting" it into a torque request at the wheels by means of a powertrain model), in order to modify the vehicle's speed profile until the traffic light has been approached. The function has been developed in an innovative co-simulation environment: Matlab / Simulink, Oktal SCANeR and VI-Grade CarRealTime softwares were used simultaneously during the simulations. The first one for powertrain model and controls, the second one for modeling the road environment, intersections and traffic lights, and the third for an accurate vehicle dynamics simulation. Moreover, in SCANeR a scenario based in Bologna city has been created, which is RDE compliant, and where the timings of all the added traffic lights were kindly provided by “Comune di Bologna”.