Oak Ridge National Laboratory has been awarded $3.36 million from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, or ARPA-E, to develop novel control technologies for connected and automated vehicles with the goal of achieving a 20 percent improvement in vehicle energy efficiency, a press release said.

The project will focus on developing and implementing control technologies in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, or PHEV, to achieve the following: compute optimal routing to bypass bottlenecks, accidents, special events, and other conditions that affect traffic flow; accelerate and decelerate optimally based on traffic conditions and the state of the surrounding roads; and optimize onboard powertrain efficiency.

“This approach changes the mathematical framework of how the vehicle is controlled and optimized today,” said ORNL’s Andreas Malikopoulos, the project’s principal investigator. “With our proposed concept, the vehicle will no longer operate in isolation but will be considered as part of an integrated system, which ultimately could help increase energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gas emissions.” [Read more…]