Privacy-Preserving Platooning Control of Vehicular Cyber–Physical Systems With Saturated Inputs

Metaverse allows the physical reality to tightly integrate with the digital universe. As one typical metaverse application, platooning control of vehicular cyber–physical systems has attracted extensive attention as it is beneficial to improve traffic efficiency, driving safety, and emission reduction. However, due to the open nature of wireless communication networks, the transmitted vehicle-to-vehicle (V2V) data packets become exposed to the public and concomitant data leakage can lead to unintended consequences to vehicular platoons. This article is concerned with the privacy-preserving platooning control issue of vehicular cyber–physical systems with input saturations. First, a novel distributed proportional-integral observer is proposed to estimate the full state of each vehicle, where the integral terms with a forgetting factor facilitate to realize the tradeoff between transient performance and steady-state performance for the platoon. Second, sampled-data-based dynamic encryption and decryption schemes, featuring a dynamic private key, are developed such that the encrypted and decrypted V2V data can be kept private to each platoon vehicle. It is then shown that the platooning control problem over a generic communication topology can be cast into the stability issue of an auxiliary dynamic system. Furthermore, sufficient conditions on the existence of the desired observer and controller gains as well as the private key parameter selection are derived to guarantee the desired platoon stability and privacy preservation requirements. Finally, an illustrative example is given to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method.