Impact of Automated Lane Change Assist on Energy Consumption

Automated lane change assist combined with adaptive cruise control has the potential to reduce energy consumption and improve safety. This paper models adaptive cruise control combined with automated lane change assist to investigate the energy consumption improvements that such a system may provide compared to conventional adaptive cruise control. Automatically executing a lane change may improve efficiency, for example, when following a vehicle that is slowing to make a turn. Changing lanes while maintaining speed should be more efficient than staying in the same lane as the turning vehicle and reducing speed. The differences in such scenarios are simulated in a virtual environment using a cuboid model with idealized sensors. The ego-vehicle will detect scenarios, evaluate if a lane change is feasible, and possibly perform a lane change to reduce or eliminate required speed changes. The results of the simulations compare the energy content of the resulting drive cycle as an idealized method to measure energy consumption for each cruise control strategy. The simulations consider traffic laws, such as turn signal requirements that may dictate the distance the ego-vehicle must travel before the lane changes can be executed.