Design and analysis of control strategies for vehicle platooning

This paper presents a novel vehicle platoon control algorithm using Vehicle to Vehicle (V2V) and Vehicle to Infrastructure (V2I) wireless communications between platoon members. A platoon forms a chain of vehicles (e.g., trucks) for improved traffic and fuel efficiency. Platooning algorithms aim to maintain small inter-vehicular distance between vehicles under dynamic driving conditions like acceleration and deceleration. The random delay and dropped messages have a pronounced impact on the control algorithm especially in a congested communication network. In this work, a decentralized platooning control strategy is proposed such that each vehicle can independently switch between multiple controller strategies dependent on communication topologies or the pattern of information exchange from vehicles in-front. The control strategy takes into account V2V communication delay of up to 100ms. In order to overcome the impact of dropped messages a predictive control scheme is proposed. We show the existence of well-known Common Quadratic Lyapunov Function (CQLF), to prove the stability of this switched system. Simulation results show that the proposed control algorithm maintains stability and can keep the inter-vehicle gap deviation less than ±6.3% under imperfect communication conditions for a sinusoidal acceleration input between ±2m/s2: