Dynamic Event-Triggered Vehicle Platooning Control: Trade-off Between Communication Efficiency and Platoon Performance

This paper addresses the co-design problem of event-triggered communication scheduling and cooperative longitudinal control for automated vehicles subject to unknown external disturbances and vehicular accelerations. The central aim is to achieve automated vehicle platoons with desired platoon stability and robustness as well as prescribed spacing requirement, while simultaneously accomplishing improved communication efficiency. Toward this aim, a novel dynamic event-triggered platooning control strategy is developed such that the inter-vehicle communications are scheduled efficiently over time. Then, a co-design criterion of the admissible platoon control laws and the desired dynamic triggering laws is derived. It is shown that the co-design criterion empowers a comprehensive trade-off analysis between due communication efficiency and prescribed platoon performance. Finally, simulation results are presented to demonstrate the merits of the proposed co-design approach.