A Dynamic Programming-Based Real-Time Predictive Optimal Gear Shift Strategy for Conventional Heavy-Duty Vehicles

This paper examines the problem of utilizing upcoming terrain and vehicle speed predictions for gear shift trajectory optimization in conventional heavy-duty vehicles. The paper is motivated by the fuel savings potential of such optimization, especially in connected and automated heavy-duty trucks. A key goal of this work is to develop a computationally tractable online shifting algorithm with a fuel saving potential approaching that of existing offline global optimization methods from the literature. We consider two optimization objectives, namely, fuel consumption and gear shift frequency. We use dynamic programming to navigate the Pareto tradeoff between these objectives offline, for known vehicle duty cycles. The resulting gear shift trajectories collapse to an instantaneous shift map in the Pareto limit where fuel consumption minimization is the sole objective. We construct a neural network that anticipates the upcoming Pareto-optimal gear shift decision, given a sequence of gear shifts deemed ideal by the simple, instantaneous Pareto-limit shift map. We train this neural network using mix of urban, suburban, and highway drive cycles. The neural network reduces fuel consumption by 0.43%-4.16% in simulation, compared to a benchmark rule-based gear shift strategy.