Abstract: Platooning research can effectively solve the problems of freight safety, energy waste and environmental pollution of commercial vehicles, but the most existing platooning researches are based on homogeneous platoon with single target tracking control, which cannot achieve good control effects in real world freight scenes. In this paper, a heterogeneous platoon composed of battery electric commercial vehicles is constructed, for which a distributed nonlinear model predictive controller is designed. According to the road environmental information and the tracking, safety, comfort and energy saving characteristics of vehicle, the controller models for leading vehicle and follower vehicles are established respectively to realize the multi-target control of heterogeneous platoon. For verifying the effectiveness of the control method proposed, a control simulation platform for a heterogeneous platoon consisting of 5 commercial vehicles with different dynamic characteristics is built, and a Trucksim/Simulink co-simulation is conducted. The results show that the control algorithm proposed can effectively achieve multi-target control of the heterogeneous platoon of commercial vehicle, with an over 5.3% reduction in energy consumption, compared with PIC constant-speed cruise control

Key words: battery electric commercial vehicle, heterogeneous platoon, multi-target control