Decentralized Energy Management for Wireless Power Transfer Assisted Platoon Autonomous Driving: A Leader-to-Follower Approach

By platooning, a string of autonomous electric vehicles (AEVs) is instructed to accept simultaneous driving control to facilitate the autonomous driving with improved traffic safety and efficiency. However, an AEV with limited battery capacity cannot stably travel with the platoon if its energy is exhausted, which leads to unexpected platoon splitting and further influences the platoon stability. To overcome the bottleneck of platoon lifetime, we integrate wireless power transfer (WPT) into platooning and propose WPT assisted platoon autonomous driving based on a leader-to-follower approach. Specifically, an energy-rich AEV plays as a leader in the platoon to provide reliable and trusted energy replenishment for energy-deficient platoon members who play as followers. We introduce the implementation of the leader-to-follower WPT and study its decentralized energy management. A user-oriented energy allocation problem is formulated, and a Nash mechanism is proposed to solve the problem through a game-based interaction among the noncooperative users. Numerical results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism can obtain the optimal solution in a privacy-friendly way and has great advantages in improving the overall satisfaction of users.