Research on Ecological Driving Following Strategy Based on Deep Reinforcement Learning

Traditional car-following models usually prioritize minimizing inter-vehicle distance error when tracking the preceding vehicle, often neglecting crucial factors like driving economy and passenger ride comfort. To address this limitation, this paper integrates the concept of eco-driving and formulates a multi-objective function that encompasses economy, comfort, and safety. A novel eco-driving car-following strategy based on the deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is proposed, employing the vehicle’s state, including data from the preceding vehicle and the ego vehicle, as the state space, and the desired time headway from the intelligent driver model (IDM) as the action space. The DDPG agent is trained to dynamically adjust the following vehicle’s speed in real-time, striking a balance between driving economy, comfort, and safety. The results reveal that the proposed DDPG-based IDM model significantly enhances comfort, safety, and economy when compared to the fixed-time headway IDM model, achieving an economy improvement of 2.66% along with enhanced comfort. Moreover, the proposed approach maintains a relatively stable following distance under medium-speed conditions, ensuring driving safety. Additionally, the comprehensive performance of the proposed method is analyzed under three typical scenarios, confirming its generalization capability. The DDPG-enhanced IDM car-following model aligns with eco-driving principles, offering novel insights for advancing IDM-based car-following models.