Distributed model predictive control for vehicle platooning: A brief survey

Vehicle platooning (enforcing the vehicles to follow each other and to maintain a safe distance between them) could be the solution to the stringent problems that appear on existing highways. Moreover, it has been already proved that by including communication between vehicles (yielding cooperative vehicles) the performances of the resulting platoons are much greater than those obtained without communication between vehicles. The specific particularities of the vehicle platoons, i.e., the chain structure of the involved sub-systems (vehicles), make them suitable as distributed model predictive control applications. As such, this paper intends to make a survey on the recent results regarding distributed model predictive control for the vehicle platooning problem, starting with inter-vehicle communications in a platoon, vehicle and platoon modeling and control, distributed model predictive control solutions and ending with some conclusions and future research directions.