Resource-Efficient Platooning Control of Connected Automated Vehicles Over VANETs

This paper is concerned with distributed cooperative longitudinal platooning control of connected automated vehicles over resource-constrained vehicular ad-hoc networks. First, a general platoon-based control framework is constructed, which simultaneously accounts for unknown leader control input, external disturbances, intermittent data samplings and transmissions, various spacing policies, and different vehicle-to-vehicle communication topologies. To alleviate excessive occupancy of the limited communication resources, an adaptive Zeno-free event-triggered communication mechanism is developed to determine when the sampling and transmission actions of vehicular data should be performed among interacting vehicles. Then, a scalable co-design approach for the desired adaptive platoon controller as well as event triggering condition is developed. One promising feature of the proposed platooning control strategy is that it is independent on the platoon scale or any global knowledge of the associated communication topology, and thus implementable on each vehicle in a scalable manner. Finally, several numerical case studies are conducted to verify the efficacy of the derived approach.