Adaptive cruise controller design: A comparative assessment for PWA systems

We propose the design of an adaptive cruise controller (ACC) of a Smart vehicle as a benchmark set up for methods developed for piecewise affine (PWA) systems based on model predictive control (MPC) arguments. The control law of the system aims at achieving a trade-off between tracking and fuel consumption while guaranteeing specific constraints, related to physical limitations, safety/comfort issues, environment protection and energy saving. In this paper we consider some PWA MPC control design methods, an on-line, an offline and a robust on-line and compare them with an on-line linear approximation and an off-line gain scheduling approach. The results will be briefly described and the algorithms will be tested in terms of key issues for real implementation and accuracy of the solution.