Panagiotis Typaldos, "Minimization of fuel consumption for vehicle trajectories", Master Thesis, School of Production Engineering and Management, Technical University of Crete, Chania, Greece, 2017
https://doi.org/10.26233/heallink.tuc.68489
Nowadays, the energy and fuel consumption reduction is of high importance. The current trend towards increased mobility and transportation growth in the more developed countries runs counter to the purposes of controlling the greenhouse effect, local pollution and the exploitation of fuel resources. The fact that mobility is increasing and millions of new drivers start using private cars as a main mode of transportation every year, leads on an increase in the demand for primary energy, and the more fossil energy is used, the more the local emissions and the corresponding greenhouse gases emissions are increased, so fuel consumption is a crucial issue and it is carried out intensive research in order to be found an optimal solution. The objective of this work is the minimization of the fuel consumption of vehicles moving on a freeway. This is achieved by the use of optimal control theory, firstly analytically and then numerically. The aim of the optimal control problem is to find an optimal control trajectory u(t), which minimize the cost criterion and satisfies the system constrains at the same time. With the term system constrains, we mean the system’s state equations. The cost criterion of the problem is the fuel consumption and the control variable is the acceleration.