Design and simulation evaluation of cooperative adaptive cruise control for a platoon of vehicles

The semnificative growth of the number of vehicles around the world can conduct to a condensation of the highway traffic. Therefore, the research to find optimal solutions for a higher vehicle flow on highways in a shorter time and with less accidents is ongoing. The organization of vehicles in platoons represents an appropriate method for increasing the roads' capacities. This type of organization permits the decreasing of the distances between vehicles using an electronic coupling made by suitable devices. This functionality allows the simultaneous acceleration or deceleration of all vehicles in the platoon. Moreover, the intelligent vehicles are capable to automatically join or leave the platoon. Another advantage of this system is the decreasing of the fuel consumption and implicitly of the pollution. In this paper, a design approach for cooperative adaptive cruise control (CACC) of vehicle platooning is presented together with a performance evaluation through simulations. The proposed CACC system is based only on the communication with the directly preceding vehicle and consists of a cruise control system for the leader vehicle and a combination of feedback and feed-forward control systems for the followers. An ACC feedback controller is used to keep the desired inter-vehicle distance and a feed-forward one to reduce the effect of measurable disturbances.