摘要：Aircraft conceptual design optimizations that maximize the performance at a design condition （single-point） may result in designs with unsatisfying off-design performance. To further improve aircraft efficiency under actual flight operations, there is a need to consider multiple flight conditions （multipoint） in aircraft conceptual design and optimization. A new strategy for multipoint optimizations in aircraft conceptual design is proposed in this paper. A wide-body aircraft is taken as an example for both single-point and multipoint optimizations with the objective of maximizing the specific hourly productivity. Boeing 787-8 flight data was used in the multipoint opti- mization to reflect the true objective function. The results show that the optimal design from the multipoint optimization has a 7.72% total specific hourly productivity increase of entire flight missions compared with that of the baseline aircraft, while the increase in the total specific hourly productivity from the single-point optimal design is only 5.73%. The differences between the results of single-point and multipoint optimizations indicate that there is a good option to further improve aircraft efficiency by considering actual flight conditions in aircraft conceptual design and optimization.

摘要：The impact of the adaptive cruise control（ ACC）system on improving fuel efficiency is evaluated based on the vehicle-specific power. The intelligent driver model was first modified to simulate the ACC system and it was calibrated by using empirical traffic data. Then, a five-step procedure based on the vehicle-specific power was introduced to calculate fuel efficiency. Five scenarios with different ACC ratios were tested in simulation experiments, and sensitivity analyses of two key ACC factors affecting the perception-reaction time and time headway were also conducted. The simulation results indicate that all the scenarios with ACC vehicles have positive impacts on reducing fuel consumption. Furthermore, from the perspective of fuel efficiency, the extremely small value of the perception-reaction time of the ACC system is not necessary due to the fact that the value of 0.5 and 0.1 s can almost lead to the same reduction in fuel consumption. Finally, the designed time headway of the ACC system is also proposed to be large enough for fuel efficiency, although its small value can increase capacity. The findings of this study provide useful information for connected vehicles and autonomous vehicle manufacturers to improve fuel efficiency on roadways.

摘要：Road throughput can be increased by driving at small inter-vehicle time gaps. The amplification of velocity disturbances in upstream direction, however, poses limitations to the minimum feasible time gap. This effect is covered by the notion of string stability. String-stable behavior is thus considered an essential requirement for the design of automatic distance control systems, which are needed to allow for safe driving at time gaps well below 1 s. Using wireless inter-vehicle communications to provide real-time information of the preceding vehicle, in addition to the information obtained by common Adaptive Cruise Control （ACC） sensors, appears to significantly decrease the feasible time gap, which is shown by practical experiments with a test fleet consisting of six passenger vehicles. The large-scale deployment of this system, known as Cooperative ACC （CACC）, however, poses challenges with respect to the reliability of the wireless communication system. A solution for this scalability problem can be found in decreasing the transmission power and/or beaconing rate, or adapting the communications protocol. Although the main CACC objective is to increase road throughput, the first commercial application of CACC is foreseen to be in truck platooning, since short distance following is expected to yield significant fuel savings in this case.