Cost-Effective Architecture for Integrating Look-Ahead Information for Commercial Vehicle Powertrains

Fuel saving technology can be pursued in many different forms, such as gearing mechanism improvement to powertrain system optimization. With the increasing maturity and availability of sensing technologies such as GPS, motion-detecting sensors, and wireless communications, the vehicle powertrain system design community is embracing these information sources by developing mobile platforms for efficiency improvement. In this paper, a self-contained system architecture is presented that integrates the digital map database, radar senor, V2x, and mobile traffic data from the wireless network for commercial vehicle driver assistance. Each data source utilizes a different communication protocol. As such, the system integration can be challenging and may involve significant investment including engineering development if a suitable system architecture is not defined. This paper introduces a single board computer (SBC) based architecture to integrate these sensors with the powertrain system as a cost-effective implementation. Finally, some field testing data will be presented to show the benefits of using look-ahead information for improving the freight efficiency.