Distributed Model Predictive Control for Vehicle Platooning with Intermittent Communication

The problem of distributed cooperative control of vehicle platoon is addressed, subject to irregular time-varying delays and possible information losses in the communication links among the vehicles. Our control objective is to drive the vehicles to reach a line formation with the desired spacing while moving forward according to the platoon leader’s velocity. Firstly, we propose an intermittent communication algorithm to obtain a reference velocity for vehicle tracking. Secondly, we use a DMPC strategy to track the reference velocity for achieving the control objective of the vehicle formation. Finally, the paper concludes by illustrating the applicability and effectiveness of our proposal through simulated experiments over PF communication topology.