Design of Distributed Cyber–Physical Systems for Connected and Automated Vehicles With Implementing Methodologies

With the development of communication and control technology, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have received increasing attention from both industry and academia. However, plenty of studies providing different formulations for ITS depend on Master Control Center and require a high level of hardware configuration. The systematized technologies for distributed architectures are still not explored in detail. In this paper, we proposed a novel distributed cyber–physical system for connected and automated vehicles, and related methodologies are illustrated. Every vehicle in this system is modeled as a double-integrator and supposed to travel along a desired trajectory for maintaining a rigid formation geometry. The desired trajectory is generated by reference leading vehicles using information from multiple sources, while ordinary following vehicles use velocity and position information from their nearest neighbors and sensor information from on-board sensors to correct their own performance. Information graphs are used to illustrate the interaction topology between connected and automated vehicles. Edge computing technology is used to analyze and process information, such that the risk of privacy leaks can be greatly reduced. The performance scaling laws for the network with a one-dimensional information graph are generalized to networks with
D
-dimensional information graphs, and the results of the experiments show that the performance of the connected and automated vehicles matches very well with analytic predictions. Some design guidelines and open questions are provided for the future study.