Optimal strategies for adaptive cruise control

In addition to providing good tracking capability and re- ducing fuel consumption, an Adaptive Cruise Control (ACC) system is required to be very comfortable. Although several appealing ACC poli- cies 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 opti- mally 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 chap- ter 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 appli- cation on real vehicles via simulations.