Maintaining cohesive fleets via swarming with small-world communications

A car fleet is a group of cars that should travel close together at a common speed. Due to dynamic road conditions, traffic signals, road speed limits and other factors, a car fleet may suffer from frequent partition. This paper proposes a distributed cohesive car fleet maintenance scheme by employing a swarming model complemented by a small world phenomenon. Vehicles within a car fleet are classified into the roles of pseudo-leader and follower. Within each partition, cars form a cohesive swarm by coordinating their speed and position via short-distance V2V communications. To exchange information between partitions of a dispersed car fleet, pseudo-leaders communicate via long-distance V2I communications, which resemble the shortcuts of the small world phenomenon. Pseudo-leaders then determine their relative positions within the car fleet, and decide to speed up or slow down so as to achieve a cohesive swarming behavior of the entire car fleet. Merits of the distributed scheme are demonstrated through simulations.